I owe you an apology. As our clients, list-members and visitors know, BBI had been promoting the SwitchISP service beginning in June of 2005. We have also run many newspaper ads in the Western New England area, as well as distributed flyers and other promotional materials at several events in the past year.

Starting shortly after we became dealers of the service, we began having trouble with SwitchISP. We began contacting the company with support requests. Those initial requests for support went unanswered. 10 months and dozens of attempts to contact SwitchISP - whether to technical support, quality assurance or the CEO himself, were completely ignored.

We initially just chalked this up to typically bad dealer support after the sale, however, soon it was clear to me that there was a lot more going on that the company was not informing its dealers about.

Starting around December 2005, SwitchISP stopped paying our commissions. Their excuse was that Nigerian, Russian and Asian spammers had infiltrated their system.

Sometime around the end of January 2006, SwitchISP took its member / dealer forum off-line - which was the final source of information for us all - even though it was strictly edited to remove any posts mentioning anything about the commission issues.

It's not entirely clear when SwitchISP stopped accepting new members, but that is certainly the case now - the system no longer accepts new sign-ups stating that they are "updating the system with new features".

After another batch of e-mails to SwitchISP / ISPVIP.biz / ServiceOnly.Com (or whoever the company actually is) sent in late March 2006 were ignored, we went forward with a formal complaint to the Los Angeles Better Business Bureau. ISPVIP.biz / SwitchISP.com is not an official member of the BBB, however they do have a record there.

The response to our BBB complaint from the SwitchISP CEO was interesting, to say the least. At first, they accused us of getting the service free - and that we had no reason to complain (which was not true). Amazingly, they also stated that the distributorship plan was not part of their program and that we were getting exactly what we were paying for..., only dial-up service. Of course, the main selling point of their service was the distributorship. In fact, they also offered a distributorship-only package for those who lived outside the USA and didn't want the extra dial-up service. Anyhow, after much wrangling, they did eventually make a catch-up commissions payment in March 2006 via PayPal - but, have not made any additional payment since then.

Again, I apologize for promoting this service to you. We should have been more diligent in checking them out before promoting SwitchISP. Even now in 2007, when searching for Switch ISP, you will still see many of the old pages show up promoting the distributorship program..., there are probably hundreds of them.

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If you're looking for a good, reliable and resonably priced dial-up ISP, try Earthlink or People PC. Be sure to check the terms of each as they often have very low rates for the first few months and then will change to the standard rate. If you're willing to sign on for a one-year term, you can usually further reduce these already low monthly fees.

Use the direct ISP links below for more details on these well-known ISPs

EarthLink Dialup

 

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