[Discuss] Cable Modem Woes / Looking to Compare Notes

[mark at buttery.org (Shirley Márquez Dúlcey)]

My only FiOS horror story is the inability to get it. Verizon wanted to
come to Boston but was unwilling to commit to hooking up the entire city;
Menino wouldn't sign off unless they did. If Verizon had gotten its way I
probably STILL wouldn't have gotten service, as I live in one of the parts
of the city that they would have chosen not to serve. Boston was already
burned once by RCN, which has a full-city license but only offers service
in a handful of areas.

In any case, they now seem to have gotten into a gentlemen's agreement with
the cable companies to not expand service, and thus make sure that places
that don't already have real competition won't get it.

So far Comcast has been pretty good here, though there are occasional
outages. Certainly much better than Clearwire or than the Speakeasy DSL we
had before that. To be fair to Speakeasy, it was only in recent years we
had trouble with them. We had a reliable 768K SDSL connection for many
years, but when that got to be too slow for modern internet use we tried to
upgrade to a faster ADSL connection and that never worked, largely due to
Verizon's failure to deliver acceptable copper. (For some reason they
couldn't just convert the good circuit we already had, they insisted on
installing a new one.)


On Thu, Apr 25, 2013 at 12:18 PM, Daniel Barrett
<dbarrett at blazemonger.com>wrote:

> On April 25, 2013, Rick Umali wrote:
> >I'm looking to compare notes with people who use Comcast Internet....
>
> I used Comcast Internet for years, and frequently had outages like the one
> you described. At a certain point, they became intolerable, with dropouts
> every day. I spent a month or two with Comcast technical support, emailing
> traceroute diagrams to them, and having none of their fixes solve the
> problem. At that point, I switched to Verizon FIOS. Since that time six
> years ago, I've had only *one* FIOS outage caused outside my home. (Inside
> my house, I've had to reboot the FIOS hardware maybe once a year.) And FIOS
> was noticeably faster.
>
> I kept Comcast for TV however, since it was only $19/month for a minimal
> plan (no set-top box, directly connected to our TVs). Then about a year
> ago, when the Great TV Digital Changeover happened, Comcast supplied me
> with free converter boxes that caused no end of problems and frustration.
> The TV signal kept dropping, channels vanished, etc. I found a similar
> no-set-top-box plan on FIOS for even less money, $10/month, switched, and
> never had a problem again.
>
> I know that other people have FIOS horror stories, but my experiences have
> been only positive.
>
> --
> Dan Barrett
> dbarrett at blazemonger.com
>
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