Comcast Let Me Down
It rained a little bit in Atlanta this evening and our cable connection, provided by Comcast, has been down for the last 6 hours. When I called 5 hours ago, they said it would be up in 3-4 hours. I just called again and they said it would be another 4-6 hours.
Someone needs to provide a blogger’s connection - 5Mbit down, 10Mbit up with a 99.99% uptime guarantee. Chris and I are starting to think that a Full T1 connection might actually be worth it. We had considered switching to Business class SDSL, but that would require us paying for phone service too. Speaking of connections, Charter Communications now offers a 10/1Mbit line. For those wondering, I’m on the Internet right now with my Moto Q’s EVDO and even that connection is sketchy.
I know out here in Denver, Comcast actually won’t do work if it’s dark outside…literally. There was an outage in my area at about 9PM and so I called in and the customer service person said “It will be morning before a technician gets out there to take a look as we do not do service work at night.”
So…good luck. :)
Your problem is living with too few people. I live in a house with 9 other guys so all the bills are split 10 ways.
When we called the cable company I asked about their “business grade” connections and found out that their business speed was only an extra $5/person every month, so we got that.
I checked the speed two weeks ago and I had 6mb down and 700kb up - nothing incredible, but not too bad for residential internet access.
Our line is rated 6Mbit down, 384Kbit up and we did a speed test when it was working yesterday and we got ~1Mbit down/50Kbit up. I should have lived on campus this year.
Haha, I’m still awake writing a paper here (North Carolina) and it’s just starting to rain. Must be some storm moving north from where you are.
I’ll lose my internet connection when we have big storms every now and then, and I’m always the first in my neighborhood to notice and call the cable company.
Paul, I live here in Buckhead (just accross town), and actually, the Bellsouth DSL around here isn’t that bad. I get 2-2.9 mb/s reliably, and a very reliable upstream. The thing rarely goes down.
Josh is right, they (at least, in Denver) don’t do anything after the end of the workday. Assholes. I blogged about this too: They can only compensate you a dollar or two for a day of downtime right? (~$45/30 days) But at the same time you feel you’re paying too much for the internet, right?. Which is it?
My ISP (the bankrupt-Adelphia-turned-time-warner-but-not-yet) goes down at least once every month for an undetermined period of time of at least 6 hours. It’s beautiful. $70/m for a cable tv + 550kbps down, 55kbps up true speed connection. and it’s down at least once a month.
It’s not as bad as oh, say, Rogers, Shaw and Charter Communications.
I’m not so sure a 5mbps down / 10mbps up circuit is a ‘blogger’ connection so much as a ‘torrent’ connection. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Then again, just how much do you expect to get from a consumer-grade oversold shared connection?
Seriously, I think blogging could be done on a 56k modem dude. Edit text, send, its pretty much as easy as sending an e-mail.
Hear hear, I agree with Andrew and Robert. 5mbps down / 10 mbps up is certainly not a blogger connection
Off topic:
Does the Motorola Q play nice with your Mac?
-Jackson
Bloggers typically upload lots of pictures, hence the nice upload on my make-believe “blogger’s connection”.
One must remember that not all bloggers are created equal, some bloggers have different requirements. I can’t tell you how many times I get frustrated when it takes me 2 hours to download a benchmarking program( have you checked the size of the new 3DMark.exe lately?) or even worse upload screenshots and pictures documenting my results. Sure some bloggers could get away with a 56k modem however I am a bandwidth pig, I will use all that is available to me and then some. I’d love to see some highspeed internet connections come our way, I would fall in love with a 5mbit down, 5mbit up connection and if I could get a higher upload I’d be ecstatic.
be grateful it’s not a dodgy south american ISP… at one point everything was great- for Bolivian hosted sites.
Tech Guy: (incredulous) you mean you want to visit sites in OTHER countries?
*cue frustrated head hitting on wall sound*
:D
Charter sucks horribly. I just spent 7 months here at work getting them to do a wall fish for the cable line to our training room. We have a static ip package and have to use a cisco router just to stop their dhcp traffic from interferring with our network. Charter is the worst provider i have ever delt with. We are located in the middle of nowhere and ATT provides us a T1 for $1600 a month.
My friend here in NYC, whose dad has a T1 running to their house for work purposes, is currently suffering a T1 outage. Time Warner was nice enough to give them cable to supplement them during the outage.