ISN Purchased By Eastlink (January 22 2008)
Island Services Network is being purchased by Eastlink Communications. As most are aware, ISN is a small ISP that offers two types of internet services.
The options available at ISN are either dialup (Yes, people still use Dialup) as well as High Speed Internet.
Since 2001, ISN has been reselling the Eastlink High Speed Internet services which Eastlink offers over a cable connection, much like cable TV.
Much like reseller hosting, the only difference in the service is who provides your technicial support & the billing. In ISN & Eastlink's case, they both use Advantage Communications in one way or another.
Therefore, any ISN users migrating to Eastlink shouldn't really notice a difference in regardings to their internet connection, if anything it may speed up their services a bit and at a cheaper rate.
ISN founder, Kevin O'Brien, has stated that he believes users will still be able to use their @isn.net email addresses as well. Something which I would sure as heck hope that current ISN users will be able to do.
ISN uses Advantage Communications for their technicial support, whereas Eastlink uses Advantage for their billing support.
So does this change the playing field on PEI for ISP's? Not really. While ISN may have been one of the first ISP's on Prince Edward Island, they've always been going over another local ISP's loop.
For instance, at first ISN was using IslandTel as a backbone, therefore if IslandTel went down, sure enough so didn't ISN.
Then, ISN made the switch to Eastlink as a backbone provider. So, if Eastlink went down, sure enough ISN did too.
So in short, ISN customers is merely a glorified customer of a larger ISP such as Eastlink.
My own experience with ISN years ago was good. That was back in the dialup days when they offered their 33.6k dialup connection, while Sympatico was offering 56k/v.90.
The only thing I was unimpressed about with ISN was their co-location room when I inquired about housing a dotServing server within their room. The room was a mess with cables running every which way and was in no way up to dotServing standards, we require at least 2 continuous backbones.
And their lack of interest in bringing High speed internet to me years ago when living at my parents place.
Other then that, I haven't heard many complaints or many praises for the company so I would assume they were typically doing a good job.
