Acquisition

Monday, 1 June 1998

A press release has just come in through Interport's announcement mailing list. Interport has just been acquired by RCN, a large provider of phone, cable, and net service. Oddly enough, I'd been looking into RCN a few weeks ago when I was trying to find out if there was any way I could get cable modem service, and what that would cost. I couldn't get a simple answer out of their website, but I suspect that the answer to the first question is a lot closer to "yes" now than it was then.

My first reaction, which is my kneejerk reaction to any announcement of a company I rely upon being bought by another company, was that the quality of Interport's service would immediately go down the toilet. I don't know if this will turn out to be the case, but if it does, I'll probably jump ship to Panix, which only charges about US$5/month more, has all of the features that I've grown to depend on (like Unix shell access and mail filtering), and has a much better Usenet feed. But my knee isn't omniscient; this may turn out to be a change for the better.

The first bad sign -- the use of "quality" as an adjective:

"When we look to acquire Internet providers, we look for quality companies with quality people," said David C. McCourt, chairman and CEO of RCN.

In anticipation of a possible change of ISP, I've registered with Bigfoot.com, an Internet forwarding service. That means that if you want to send me email, do so at avram@bigfoot.com (unless you're a spammer, in which case just stick it up your ass), and if you've got the home page of this site bookmarked, change the URL to http://www.bigfoot.com/~avram/ in your bookmarks file. For pages that aren't the home page, just change the part of the URL that says users.interport.net to say bigfoot.com instead.