Internet Connect/NorthPoint DSL Customers Screwed by AT&T?

From Scott Spindler, "Last night our SDSL service through Internet Connect went down. I thought it was simply due to the weather or a router being down somewhere. Well, after an hour of nothing, I called Internet Connect's tech support. I was greeted with a message that said that if I received my access via Northpoint, to press option 8. I did this and was greeted with a message that said Northpoint has been bought out by AT&T and AT&T has shut down Northpoint's network leaving nearly 100,000 customers without service. Internet Connect was 'kind enough' to give us a dial-up account while they work on finding another company such as Covad or Rhythms to take over our service. It seems though that neither one offers DSL service in the Waldorf. MD, area. I can't believe that AT&T wouldn't want to service customers such as myself. I also find it hard to believe that AT&T can get away with such a thing. Get more info at www.internetconnect.net."

Here is a CNet article on the impact in California. The article states that while AT&T bought NorthPoint's assets, it can not operate them until it gets various government agency approvals. NorthPoint shut down and laid off most of its employees causing the loss of service.

[Update: This Saturday morning Washington Post article blames the blackout on AT&T not buying NorthPoint's customer base when it bought NorthPoint's assets because most of the customers were businesses and AT&T wants to focus on home customers.]

[Update 2: From Fred Kinder, "One of my clients, the Pinto Horse Association of America in Ft. Worth, Texas, was using Savvis/Northpoint as their ISP. With no prior notice, their DSL connection went dark at 10 AM on Friday morning. It took about an hour to determine that the DSL connection would not be resurrected in the near future, and since the Association relies heavily on an in-house Apache/Linux server for their internet presence and email, we knew we had a potential nightmare facing us. Time to implement Plan B.

With a little arm-twisting, I was able to get Savvis to update their primary DNS records to redirect www.pinto.org internet traffic from the dead IP address to my home office DSL address, the change took about two hours to accomplish.

During that two hour wait time, I was able to purchase and install a copy of Mac OS X on my PowerBook G3 (Pismo 500) and recover a backup copy of the Pinto website from my PowerMac 9500 development machine. By the time the DNS servers were updated and working properly, I had an Apache/MacOS X mirror site up and running on the Powerbook. Total downtime was less than 4 hours, and a potential disaster was averted.

MacOS X and Pismo to the rescue!"]

[Update 3: From Scott Spindler, "Here's a link to a very well-written petition concerning the AT&T shutdown of the NorthPoint network. I hope as many readers as possible take a moment to sign their names to it."]