Or possibly several somebodies. I won’t actually do it, of course, but I am rapidly losing my already frazzled temper with the service I’m not getting. My service seems to be available only about six hours a day. I know this because my daughter will tell me that she was able to connect to the internet while I was sleeping. Why doesn’t she wake me up? Well, apparently I Growl at people who disturb my slumber, and she has learned to leave me alone when I’m snoozing.
I have a repair appointment for Wednesday. However, I’ll be calling cable and DSL companies tomorrow, getting bids in. If I’m going to pay for high speed service, I want to be able to access it 24/7.
My husband and daughter are watching me VERY closely, because apparently I get Cranky when I don’t get enough internet interaction.
A word of warning. SBC and Verizon have cut their maintenance budget for “copper networks” to the bare bone and you may be jumping out of the frying pan into the fire with DSL or ISDN. I’m retired from SBC and have built T1/ISDN circuits for Verizon on a contract basis and I wouldn’t use anything but cable. Coax is a single circuit/multi-frequency system so if you’re the only one in your neighborhood with a problem it’s probably between your PC and their main cable. If you opt for DSL,go through an internet provider. It cost a bit more but the copper’s all the same and they get better results from the dreaded Repair Service.
They’re sub-leasing our back workroom while they re-do their local office, and I have immediate access to the local head of the company. They send him to do in person apologies when they don’t pay their rent for 3 months…or their electric bill. (“We didn’t know what the bill was for or who to pay.” I’d mailed a detailed explanation with all documentation, but their people had neglected to tell accounting that this was happening.)
Our cable and 'net access had been sporadic for months. Now, it’s perfect. NO outages, not even during thunderstorms. Amazing what they’ll do if you threaten to toss all their stuff out the door, but keep the “wall of TVs” that is against MY wall so that I have to listen to whatever they’re playing.
Don’t trust SBC DSL. In a 12 month contract, we actually had service less that half the time. The Semi-Insignificant Other won’t even have a SWB phone now. (I do, he uses his cell.) Oh, and the modem that SBC uses? TOTAL TRASH. 5 modems in one year. They just–malfunction a lot.
Let me know if I can terrorize Time Warner for you. They deserve it.
Weird, I had TW here in Houston a few months ago and it was awful. It would cut out several times every day, particularly between 2PM and 5PM on the weekends.
We moved, no TW access in this complex, so I switched to SBC. In 3 months, the cable went out once…for 10 minutes.
Modem works just fine. (was yours 2wire?)
I did have to call SBC several times because they were charging my bill improperly.
~J
(Lynn, I’ve not had the chance to say so yet, but welcome back! I hope you are doing well.)
Tell you what Lynn, give us an address and I’ll make sure a few of the “boys” go down and have a nice little “talk” with your skanky ‘net providers. They’s givin’ the rackets a bad name hereabouts and we don’t take kindly to it. Besides, my baseball bat needs some exercise anyway.
TW will tell you that they hadn’t finished the digital upgrade, and if you’d get digital, everything would be fine. (TW lies through their corporate teeth, but whadda ya want?)
Our SBC DSL was the first in the area. I think we were the guinea pigs for the Westchase area. Semi-IO says they no longer use that modem at all because of dependability problems. Yep. I understand why.
SBC wanted to charge us $1,400 to wire the second computer into the DSL access, as they hooked the primary up to the wrong incoming line. (This house has had 6 incoming lines over the years. They were distincly told which one to use, and didn’t do it.) We ran the line ourselves. Took 30 minutes and 20 feet of wire.
I have RoadRunner through Brighthouse (used to be Time-Warner) and have had virtually non-stop problems for the last month to six weeks. My modem (the third one in two weeks) drops off line at random and for random lengths of time. I have had four visits by a total of three technicians, the last of whom just may have gotten his diagnosis of the problem right. I still have my doubts, although the thing has worked properly for the last four days. At least this last guy hung around for longer than the fifteen to twenty minutes the other two guys did.
For some reason, my connection is on from about 5 AM to 6:30 AM, local time. The cable guy visits tomorrow. I WILL have my husband start his gun cleaning ritual in the living room, just before the cable appointment. I WILL throw the large dogs a huge bloody bone each, just before the appointment. I want the repair person to have an INCENTIVE to get my connection FIXED, so s/he doesn’t have to come back.
I think it’s safe to say that you’re feeling a lot more like your regular self these days, Lynn. Make sure your husband is loading the 45 auto’s clips with hollow points right when the cable guy walks through.
just some helpful advice/observations.
You have splitters that degrade the signal at every point they are installed. It may very well be that you are not getting enough signal at your modem. Have the repair guy check the signal strength at the modem. Have him tell you what the reading is (in dB) at the modem. Ask him what the working range is for the model of modem you have installed. He may very well need to call for that. Make him. You may need to remove splitters and have a line run as direct as possible to the modem. Hope this helps.
Must be nice. I have exactly one cable company and one DSL provider (BellSouth, which I’m using presently) to choose from. Then again, I shouldn’t bitch. Some folks don’t even have those choices.
If you do choose a new provider, make sure to read the fine print on their web page. Here, for example, Cox Cable runs TV ads all the time claiming how much faster their service is than DSL.
The reality, according to their official web pages? Cox is capped at 1 Mbps down, 128 Kbps up. Bellsouth DSL is 1.5 Mbps down, 256 Kbps up. Cox is flat-out lying in their TV commercials.
I also recently read an article online (I may be able to dig it up if someone needs a cite) that said that some cable companies have been limiting the total amount of data subscribers can download on their “unlimited” accounts. IIRC, it was somewhere in the neighborhood of 80GB per month, so the only people who’d be affected are those who really like downloading lots of movies and pirated software. Still, it’s a limit, that, according to the article, DSL providers are presently unwilling to implement.
Good Lord, you live in MY neighborhood! I’m currently living in the Westchase district.
I have the 2wire modem, FTR. No problems.
TW just kept telling us it was the heat and the distance from the outside cable to the inside box and then to our computers that were the problems.
Read_Neck, no they were just charging me for things that were supposed to be included elsewhere. They also charged me for voicemail services for a month, without transferring it from my old address.
[sub]Sorry.[/sub]
)
I have exactly one cable company and one DSL provider (BellSouth, which I’m using presently) to choose from. Then again, I shouldn’t bitch. Some folks don’t even have those choices.