Here are some ISPs that currently offer service in our area, along with some notes regarding my personal experience (where applicable) with them.
Eagle's Nest - Have not had personal experience, but seems that monthly charges used to be high. Eagle's nest seems to have been bought out by Crosslink.net.
Crosslink.net - My wife and I used to have service with them. About two years ago we cancelled, due to an excessive number of outages, some of which lasted for days. My understanding, from talking with others, is that service has improved since then.
Rivernet.net - I am extremely dissatisfied with Rivernet. We had about one good year of service with this company, until things started to go downhill in 2004. In short, I would not recommend Rivernet under any circumstances. If you'd like all the gory details, please see the article at the bottom of this page.
3N - Now called Netstar. Five years ago they had frequent outages, and we cancelled our account. Maybe service has improved since then.
AOL - If you can live with the AOL software, you might want to consider these guys. We have had an AOL account for over 10 years now, and service has almost always been very reliable (the only problems we encountered took place when AOL was rapidly expanding). AOL is also good for travelling, due to the large number of local access numbers.
SBC/Yahoo - This is our current ISP. So far, they've been quite reliable.
We started an account with Rivnet in February of 2003. Service was reasonably reliable for about one year, and we were pretty happy. But then things started to go downhill.
Sometime around September 2004, I received a phone call from my wife at work. She telecommutes to her employer (VCU), so she depends on a reliable internet connection. The problem that she was having was that pages advertising drugs like Cialis, Viagra, and Phentaramine were being shown at random, whenever she tried to surf the web. Furthermore, this was happening on all three of our computers.
My first thought was that we had a spyware or virus. But I could not figure out how this could have happened. I had the latest service packs on all the computers, as well as a mix of Norton and MkAfee Antivirus software, firewalls, and Adaware as well. To make a long story short, I burned up three evenings looking for a problem, and even reinstalled Windows XP on my laptop. The puzzling thing was that there were no pop-ups, and no redirects to the bogus pages. Instead, the HTML source for bogus pages was being substituted for the desired pages. I couldn't find any web proxy servers (aside from the firewalls) running on my PCs either. I was stumped.
Eventually, I found the problem also occurred with my PocketPC as well (a cross platform virus/adware like this does not exist), and I finally figured out that the problem was on Rivnet's end. After a phone call to their tech support and some pointed questions, they admitted that they were having 'hardware issues' and that the problem would be cleared up that day, which it was. So I was out three evenings of my time, but I figured that I would give these guys another chance. At that time, there was no service notice of any kind posted on their web pages about their problem.
Then in November of 2004, we started experiencing very slow throughput from our connection (on the order of what you could expect from a 28K rather than 56K modem). Once again, I figured the problem was on our end. So I checked the phone lines, and tried different access numbers. I ran tracert to determine where the problems were. I also measured the throughput to our AOL connection and found that it was on the order of 50Kbps (with much lower latency as well), which is what you should expect for a reasonably good 56K connection. I called to complain, but was told that the "problem was on my end". The tech I spoke to told me this, without checking a single damn thing, it was like a canned response.
I was getting pretty fed up with the level of service we were getting, but unfortunately, we had just renewed our account in November, and wanted to stick it out a bit longer. But the problems persisted into February, and we'd had enough.
Ok, I decided to start an account with Yahoo (so far very reliable and fast), and cancel the Rivnet account. So first, my wife tried calling in mid February, but she was told that the probability of getting a refund was low. When I called to ask for a partial refund ( 2/24/05, from someone called Jim Thorne), I was told that they don't give refunds and that the reason my connection was slow was that I had spyware and viruses on my machine and that "they get spyware and viruses on their computers all the time". Well that explains quite a bit doesn't it?
Once again, I was told this as an automatic response, even though I insisted that I was running AV software, antispyware, etc. I was told that under no circumstances would we be issued even a partial refund. And to top it off, Mr. Thorne was very rude about the whole thing, and it was obvious that he could care less what I said, since he already had my money.
So there you have it. My advice is to stay as far away from Rivernet as possible. However, if you want to be ripped off, get totally unreliable service, web spam for various pharmaceuticals and surly customer service, then they might be a good bet.
Bob Pawlak