Everyone has a story to share about ISP's and their lack of responsibility when it comes to maintaining, policing, and generally "taking care of" their networks.
Now I have mine.
About 7pm CST, the central servers for a service I maintain came under a distributed denial of service attack by about a dozen IP addresses. While the source of this attack was spread out a bit, the majority of the damage was being done by a few addresses located on Verio's network. After attempting to take care of things on my end, I was able to get things under control, but they were still being a nuisance as their traffic was causing a strain on certain pieces of hardware and software. I started by calling our ISP, SBC.
Of course, I get the most imcompetent tech support "specialist" on the phone. After explaining to her the situation, she had no clue what a denial of service attack was. I explained that it was denying me of getting reasonable service from their provided Internet connection and she put me on hold for a few minutes. She then came back on the line and informed me that they cannot support my service and as long as the Internet connection was "running", it was out of their hands. I was told that all I could do was send an email to their abuse account and they would "investigate" it. Yeah, a whole hell of a lot good that will do me.
I next tried calling Verio. The guy I got on the phone listened intently and took down the IP addresses before putting me on hold. Wonder of all wonders, he came back on the line and told me the exact same thing the woman at SBC told me. WTF? Do the major ISP's share tech support phone scripts, or what?
I cannot for the life of me understand why ISP's don't give a rip what's going on over their network. I would understand their position if I had called up and said some guy was emailing me a virus, make him stop. But no, I called up with concrete data that some people on their network were flooding my network with utter crap. Some 12 year-old in NY is giggling up a storm while this 1337 script he downloaded off IRC attacks my servers and floods the hardware of the two ISP's at the start and end point of this junk, and they don't care? They expect me to email a generic abuse account so I can get an auto-response back that says they're doing everything they can to ensure my Internet experience is a pleasant one?
If they want to make my Internet experience a pleasant one, they can start by actually taking their customers seriously. Not everyone that calls the tech support line is wondering why they can't get their email to work.
/rant