Campfire needs to have dial-tone level reliability to be trustworthy. For the past five years, up until this week, we believe we've had a pretty good track record of that. But given the severity of this outage, we know it'll take us a long time to rebuild this trust. Many thanks to those of you who are giving us that second chance.

Rachel and I depend on Campfire to keep conversations flowing on TheCR Network. We've come to really appreciate how easy-to-use and reliable the service is.

Over the last week or so they had some bad days. Some really bad days. While it didn't impact us as much as it might have impacted them and some of their other clients, we did notice.

Without going into all the details (you can click through and read it all for yourself), I LOVE their response & resolution. And not just because I'll feel it in my pocketbook (a free month is nice when you're a bootstrapped start up). IMHO, they completely nailed the response and resolution of this crisis. I don't know if all of their clients feel the same way, but I'll bet most do. They're standing by what they believe in and putting their money where their mouth is.

Now to the reason for this post. I'm starting to feel like our ISP's need to realize that an internet connection needs to have "dial-tone reliability." That needs to be the standard and they need to stand behind it (with $$ if necessary).

A few weeks back Comcast had a major outage up and down the East Coast. A LOT of customers lost their internet connectivity. There was a bit of a response on Twitter, but in general I'd give them a D on response.

But what we're really highlighting here isn't response, it's resolution. On that score Comcast gets an F (I'd give them an H, but I'd lose a bunch of you). As far as I've seen they haven't said "boo" to their customers since the outage. They may have apologized on Twitter, but I didn't get a phone call to apologize. No letter in the mail with a coupon for a free bowl of soup. Nothing. I did receive my bill for the month with no recognition for the outage (or break on my monthly charges).

Am I the only one that thinks this is wrong? I'd love to see the "big guys" like Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, etc. start to act like Campfire. Treat us like people, not account numbers, and you might start to build some trust.