Comcast recently took over Cable and Internet operations in Vermont after swallowing up Adelphia several months ago. Adelphia had a lock on the entire state of Vermont, so now Comcast does. The only high-speed internet options are Comcast broadband or Verizon DSL. I jumped on Adelphia's broadband offering as soon as they started offering it and after a bumpy start, they provided rock-solid 24/7 Internet Access. I was a happy telecommuter.
Enter Comcast. I read some real horror stories about Comcast over the last few years and was grateful I wasn't a customer of theirs. Now that I am, I can only hope that the horror stories weren't true. Still hoping.
Last night I couldn't get online. My cable modem was sending but not getting a response on the wire. Like I said, it's been a long time since I had Internet access problems, but that was with Adelphia standing behind their services. When I did notice a problem I liked to call Adelphia to confirm that they knew there's a problem, which is what I did with Comcast last night.
"I'm not seeing any problem in your area, but that doesn't mean there isn't one," the support guy said, then when his soft-reboot of the cable modem didn't work (after I had hard rebooted it before calling him) he proceeded to schedule for a tech to stop by. "The next opening we have for a technician in your area is January 26th." JANUARY 26th! That was 9 days of being without Internet access. I told him that wasn't going to work. After a several minute hold he was able to reschedule for a January 18th visit. Better. Only down for two days.
Around noon today I called my neighor and asked them about their Internet access. If they were up I was thinking I would head out to Circuit City and buy a new cable modem. It was something I could do. My neighbors were down, too, "but we just came back up a few minutes ago," my neighbor Mary said. I returned to my cable modem and saw that the llights were flashing once again.
We were down for a total of 15 hours. Hello Comcast!
Damn, I hate having another point of failure in my life. You lose your Internet connection and you realize how dependent you are on it. Funny though, I must have neighbors (not Mary, someone else) who have DSL because I was able to jump on somebody's Linksys and work from my laptop this morning. Time to think about DSL myself if my relationship with Comcast goes from bad to worse.