Information Sciences Institute

We were customers for many years of USC’s Information Sciences Institute.
They sell internet access, but dealing with them is like dealing with evil people at the DMV. They don’t care, they don’t have to, they don’t need your business.
ISI piggy backs on USC but in fact has very little to do with the University. Most of their funding is military, and their Internet services are a side product.
We were in a very difficult situation with them. Can you imagine if your entire business centered around dealing with DMV style attitude from staff who feel they’re doing you a personal favor just to let you be a customer?
And they keep bankers hours.
This means, if things go down on Friday, even if it’s their fault, they are going to stay down until Monday morning.
There were a couple of times when our connection went down on a weekend due to their errors (router unplugged) and they refused to do anything about it.
Monday at 10:00 they rolled into work, plugged in the router, and we were back online.
Meanwhile, all weekend long we were getting angry calls from customers.
Unbelievable that a network this large would have nobody on duty evenings and weekends.
We finally left them over a dispute over a Linux router. We were using a large amount of traffic for all of our internet customers, and exceeded the capacity of our small 2500 series Cisco router. The 7000 series router that would replace it cost about $ 20,000 and we could not afford it, so we built our own high performance router using Linux and a $ 300 PC.
Walt Prue from ISI seemed personally offended and sent us a formal letter telling us he was banning us for using Linux in our router and not using a Cisco.
Unbelievable.
We sorted this out, and stayed about a year after that dispute, but in the end it was our reason for leaving. We refused to buy massively overpriced Cisco products and he refused to allow us to run Linux.
So we went to a private company for service that valued our business and did not give us problems about using Linux based routers. Also, if the line was down on a weekend, they would fix it and not give us attitude.
This was a number of years ago. Linux routers are now quite common, in fact, most any Wifi router you can buy, such as Linksys routers, have Linux in them. So do Android phones. Linux is all around us. LInux makes really great routers. The routing features are built into Linux, which makes it very easy. And Linksys routers, with Linux in them, are now sold by CIsco. So it’s all gone full circle.
If you are in the networking business and are thinking about doing business with Walt Prue and his friends at ISI, think long and hard. There are some advantages, such as location in Marina del Rey, and generally reasonable pricing, but I’d have to say the negatives outweigh the positives. Save a few dollars on your connection and then lose it when the line goes down and your favorite customer quits.