Residential Internet Support

There are many ways of gaining access to Allstream, including SliP or PPP dialers, and many, many programs to use once you are connected to the Internet.

We try to be as proficient as possible with the most common internet utilities and give tips, whenever possible, to our customers. We cannot however, afford to educate all of our customers on the use of their PC's and the Internet. It is the customer's responsibility to have a basic understanding of the use of their computer, the view that the Internet is new and evolving, and that there is some learning involved with connecting and using this new technology.

There are many diverse types of Internet programs. For Windows alone there are three major and many minor Internet dialers in use. Adding in other operating platforms that customers use, such as Apple, OS/2, UNIX and WindowsNT, it becomes apparent that for us to offer support for all different scenarios of Web Browsers alone would be a large undertaking. When this is expanded to include the different types of utilities (FTP, Telnet, Newsreaders, Talk, Gopher, Mail, IRC, etc...) and different versions of software available for each Operating System, we would be facing a monumental support challenge.

Our On-Line Support pages were developed to provide a fast and easy way to get help on as many applications as possible. If you cannot find what you are looking for, you may need to contact the software or hardware manufacturer or search for other support resources on the Internet.

Allstream is not responsible for any shareware or commercial software performance. We want to help our customers, but we cannot dedicate the resources to resolve every internet application that has poor documentation or implementation problems.

If you have connection problems, we will make every reasonable effort to find a solution and to rectify the situation. However, if the problem has to do with a particular application that a customer wants to run on their personal computer we cannot take the task of de-bugging that program upon ourselves. It is not from a lack of desire to help our customers, but the reality of the sheer volume of Internet applications that could potentially cause problems that makes this restriction necessary.

We will try to answer questions about applications that we don't formally support, when possible. As an Internet provider we want to help our customers, but we want to be clear that this is not a standard function of our service offering.

If you have any questions or comments concerning this policy, please feel free to contact us at 1-866-282-0111.