CAIS sold our account to NAS. They did this about 5 months back. They are just now getting around to cutting us over. This involves Covad making some changes in their switch somewhere. Back last May, it was PSINet that was selling our account to CAIS. They sent us an e-mail to announce that they were taking over the account and sent us a list of the account details that they had for us. The information was wrong. I sent them corrections. Also made sure they knew that we had our own IP addresses and to be sure to coordinate the BGP stuff with PSI when cutting over. They didn't. PSI kept announcing the routes. Ardent didnt announce them. It took me FIVE DAYS to get them to fix it. Waited on hold for 45 minutes more than 7 times and finally talked to brain dead drones on the other end each time. No luck. Finally wheedled the PSI NOCs direct number out of someone on the phone at PSI and called them. They dropped the route announcements for us. Then it took three more days to get in touch with someone at Ardent. I was able to do that by posting a message here. One of their engineers called me and we had it fixed in ten minutes. Fast forward to Dec/Jan 2001/2002: Now, CAIS (called Ardent now) sold us to Network Access Solutions (NAS). We have been paying them ever since Dec or so. Two months ago, they sent the same kind of e-mail: "We'll be cutting over your connection soon, please fill out this questionnaire, etc". I did so, and wrote a long tome at the end warning them not to mess up the BGP stuff. "It couldn't be that bad twice, could it?" I though to myself. I crossed my fingers. In their e-mail, they told me that they would soon get back to me with a cutover date. This afternoon, at 4:40PM, I got the message "Your cutover date/time is 5PM-8PM Eastern May 29, 2002 (today)" and "The date cannot be changed". Also they said "If you have your own IP addresses", it may take till midnight till the routes propagate (Now I know I'm in trouble - 5pm till midnight?). No sooner did I read the message than the connection went dead. Not the circuit, just the BGP announcements. Its now 7AM Eastern time. We've been offline 13 hours now. Phone drone at NAS says "Hmm, your not listed on our cutover sheet today". I put two and two together: They told Ardent "drop the routes today at 5" and then lost the paperwork internally so the cutover did not happen, but Ardent dropped the routes. Just got off the phone with them again after sitting on hold for 45 minutes. They dont seem to get the message that its a BGP problem and not the circuit. Last time, when we had problems, some kind engineer from CAIS sent me e-mail and offered to help and, like I said, he got us back online in, like 10 minutes. If you're out there, please let me know. I need your help again Please reply to jpp@well.com as the e-mail on this message is not accessible at this time. Sorry to bug all of you with this. Let see: 13 hours and running. Last time it was five days. Wanna take bets on how long this time? Funny thing, when I called CAIS afterwards to ask them how they were going to "make it up" to me for knocking me offline for five days, I was sent to the voicemail of some customer service manager who never returned my calls. Lets see how well NAS does. John