In My Experience... | My long wireless broadband nightmare is over. (1214)

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My long wireless broadband nightmare is over.
[ Posted by Dan on January 13, 2004 | 3 Comments ]

Back in July I signed up for the only broadband option available (at the time) in my community. It was a bit of a pricey endeavor, but when you are a crack head, you'll pay anything, and so I went ahead and signed the one year contract. I knew not the mistake I was making.

After three months from the time I faxed my contract to the company, the wireless gear I need to receive the signal was installed in my attic. The connection was an 2.4 ghz signal blasted in my direction from a high powered antenna a couple of miles away. From my home I actually have pretty good line-of-sight to the antenna, so the promise of a megabit was believable, but I was really just drinking the Kool-Aid.

After the initial set-up, I was getting seriously slow connection speeds, and had to endure a couple of weeks of configuring, tweaking, re-aligning and hour long phone conversations to get nowhere, then one day, everything worked, and worked well enough (never reaching a megabit in speed though) to play games online and check my email and work from home sometimes. Sporadic outages were the norm though, and most phone calls to the support line went unheeded.

Two weeks ago the connection died with the destruction of my provider's gear by a crane installing the gear of a competitor. They were unable to get everything back up in working order within two weeks which provided me the right to end my contract. Two weeks. That's a long fucking time to be without connectivity at home, and the whole experience has soured me on fixed wireless connectivity. Even though modems are slow, they are RELIABLE, and a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.

It took me hundreds of dollars to learn that lesson.

so are you signing up for adelphia now?

and... man... I have to laugh at this:
"connection died with the destruction of my provider's gear by a crane installing the gear of a competitor"

Talk about taking out the competition... was it an isreali company? Sure, they prefer bulldozers, but they're both big pieces of construction equipment. heh.

-Posted by JC on January 13, 2004 02:28 PM

I am currently assesing my options as they relate to current cost structures (baby, BMW payments, video game addiciton) and crack smoking priorities (online gaming). The good thing is the cost of that wireless connection is gone and I can dial-in for free (due to my employer's core competancy).

I have heard a lot of bad things about Adelphia's broadband offering in my area; in particular, a community down the road from me has a long and storied history of bad service, and I'm shell shocked from this last six months of bad service.

I can't say that I'm happy that their gear got smashed because it's a total waste and it affected me directly by knocking me offline for two weeks, but I do feel like it was a Karmic event.

-Posted by Dan on January 13, 2004 02:38 PM

isn't that core *in*competency? :-)
As for adelphia... well, there's bad service, and bad service.

I think my comcast service sucks, but only because on the very rare occasions when there is a problem, their techs try to blame it on my router, no matter what, when it's always a local problem. But there's very very little downtime and when it's working, I have no complaints. It's also nice and fast (getting about 2Mb download now on a pretty frequent basis, out of an advertised 3)

Then there's a situation like yours, with wireless and connections that just don't work.

Anything else besides adelphia open now? dsl maybe? fiber to the home? hehehe

-Posted by JC on January 14, 2004 05:06 PM

Comment posting has been turned off because I don't have enough time and will to deal with the constant comment spamming. I'm very sorry and will fix this sometime soon (soon = before 2004 ends).