Astound(ingly bad)

[dorchadas]

I realize I'm in the glorious elite for not having only one (1) internet choice, but nonetheless I must complain.

One reason American internet is laughably bad is the lack of competition. Most places have only one provider, or two if you're lucky, even in major cities. A provider in a major city might not service the whole city--I can get RCN but thosesocks can't, even though we live only about half a mile apart. And even with RCN, it's only in the last few years that my internet in one of the largest cities in America has reached the speeds I routinely got over a decade ago in Chiyoda, a rural mountain town, where my house was literally surrounded by rice paddies. Until recently, though, I've had mostly good experiences.

Yesterday, the internet went out at 2:30 p.m. and as of this post it is still out. I call every few hours or so and every time the story is the same--there's still an outage, we can't tell you what caused it, we can't tell you when it will be fixed, we're useless. I had at least one person I talked to run some modem diagnostics, have me try some things, and tell me what they were seeing on their end, but I think that's balanced out by the person who literally speed-read a canned script at me and then immediately hung up. No one can tell me anything worthwhile. There was just a Comcast truck outside, maybe providing internet to former RCN customers, though DownDetector tells me that there was also Comcast outages on a beautiful spring day with no weather problems.

Pretty sure Chiyoda had maybe one internet outage in three years, and this is a place where literal wild animals could have been chewing on the cables.

Fortunately, we have other internet technology. I'm working from home today because sashagee has had a rough few days and I'm able to do it through phone tethering. Cell service to phone tether to work VPN so the data is still protected. It's not as fast as my wired internet but it's plenty fast that I can still check webcomics on my iPad (which is also tethered) while I work. sashagee is watching Youtube thanks to us having an unlimited data plan. Just have to keep calling and seeing if there's an update, and demand a bill credit when the internet is back.

Comments

[omnipotent]

I think that's balanced out by the person who literally speed-read a canned script at me and then immediately hung up.

Yikes! That person had clearly used up their level of Care™ for the day.

Internet service in America is terrible, I have to agree. And even when you have a plethora of providers, the practice of merger/acquisition is guaranteed to reduce choice to only one or two (as has happened in my area--I was with Verizon until Verizon was bought out in the area by Frontier, and I've been with Frontier ever since. Frontier sucks, but not as badly as Spectrum). I hope you get your service back soon, but I'm glad you have a backup via tethering!

[dorchadas]

Exactly! That's part of the problem for people in the suburbs, apparently--RCN bought a local provider and then the switchover went...poorly. Some people (and local businesses) haven't had phones or internet for almost a week.

Aw, Spectrum was one of the alternatives I was looking at...though, as you say, all American providers are terrible and it's just a question of degree. I have a tech coming out tomorrow to check on the internet--we'll see what they find!

[omnipotent]

Spectrum might be better in your area than they are here! Here they bought out Brighthouse (I will never understand America’s love affair with the merger/acquisition) and Brighthouse was already a 50/50 provider before then. Now when I ask around, people with Spectrum tell me not to change but that being said, their prices tend to be a little bit better than Frontier’s.

I call every now and then and sweet-talk the agent into reducing my Internet costs by mentioning that I was grandfathered in from Verizon and don’t want to switch. It works….for now. 😅

[gwendraith]

Internet provider help desk agents are notoriously bad, at least they are here. There are some good ones but many work to a script and even you you know what the problem is they still have to go through the script and set of diagnostics. My current company is actually good and I've never lost connection, the only problem is that it's slowish, only 11mbps and they can't (won't) provide anything faster in this old listed building. But happily a new provider is going through the planning process to provide superfast internet so yay, I should be getting that in the next few months when they've installed all the new cabling in the building. I hope you get your internet back soon.

[dorchadas]

I have heard that part of the reason for the scripts is that people lie--someone knowledgeable about the problem will call in, get annoyed at being read the script, get to the part about checking the coax cable and realize it's not snuggly connected, and then say "Of course it's snug, who do you think I am??"--but it's still really annoying to just be told to try the same list of things that didn't work the last time you tried them only to find out that they still don't work.

Hopefully your new superfast internet is much better than the old internet!