I spent the evening dealing with Comcast because our Internet connection was down.
We were bleeding edge early adopters of DSL when BellSouth first rolled it out in South Florida. It took a very frustrating year or so to get it working, but then it was great for about the next five years. Unfortunately, ATT and BellSouth merged, so it went down the tubes, along with everything else ATT touched.
ATT / BellSouth merger
The BellSouth and ATT merger worked like putting a frog in a blender: what came out was still a frog, but it wasn’t the frog that you knew and loved, and it no longer worked like a frog.
When our service went up and down many times a day and we couldn’t get any satisfaction, we pulled the plug on the New ATT.
We have a Comcast Business Account
Because my wife and I depend on a reliable Internet connection, we signed up for a Comcast business preferred account that was supposed to insure us higher speeds, more reliability and faster support. That’s great, except the telephone number business customers are supposed to call gave me an error message then hung up on me three times tonight.
When I called the number for residential customers, the very nice people TRANSFERRED me to the same number I had been dialing, which meant that I went around the block three more times.
Tech blew the dust out of the lines
Finally, I got a supervisor who managed to get me to a nice tech who blew the dust out of the lines or something and restored our service. Since he didn’t have any explanation for why we went down (or why we came back up), he’s going to send a tech out Monday afternoon.
The experience left me about as cold as the snow on the back of this Ford Groves College High Driver Ed car.
Hey Kenny,
If it’s any consulation, we in Southeast Texas experience virtually the same thing with our internet service – up and down, up and down like a yo-yo. Thanks for all your wonderful articles! You’re the first thing I read in the morning.
Kathryn Carney
Onalaska, Texas – An hour north of Houston on beautiful Lake Livingston
Update:
Cell phone rang at 8:10 AM. I thought it was my alarm going off, so I silenced it and walked into the Steinhoff One-Stall Reading Library since I was now awake.
I heard Wife Lila talking to someone. It turned out that it WASN’T the alarm. It was a phone call from Comcast. She heard this plaintive voice coming from the bedstead saying, “Hello, hello, hello” and picked up the phone.
They’re sending someone out today between 11 and 2, instead of Monday.
Seven minutes later, the landline rang. It was Comcast dispatch, wanting me to describe our problem. I told them the same thing I told them last night when they created the trouble ticket.
This morning around 10:30, Lila said our ATT landline was dead. I checked all the extension to make sure they were hung up, then went out to what we used to call the demarc (for demarcation point). They’ve gotten fancy and call it the Network Interface Device.
That’s the little box where the phone company connects to your internal wiring. If the fault is on their side of the demarc, it’s on them. If it’s on your side, then it’s your problem and they’ll charge you for the visit.
It was dead on their side of the demarc. Their trouble ticket says it’ll be fixed by 6 PM Sunday, unless it isn’t.
This is a strong argument for keeping your communication services separate. I couldn’t have filed an online trouble ticket last night because the Internet was down. This morning, I couldn’t phone in a trouble ticked because the landline was down.
If you used the same carrier for both, I guess you’d have to resort to smoke signals.
We recently had a horse of a different color, almost. We had electricity but no Internet or phone lines. I checked all the phones in the house. We are so old fashioned we don’t have cell phones, only landlines and one of them is plugged directly into the phone line, so it ALWAYS works. Except this time. We waited and kept checking the phone for three hours. I finally drove to our neighbor around the curve and used her cell phone. The tech we reached immediately checked our line and said the Internet was working but I was not connected (duh) and the phone line was working. No apology, no explanation . . . just made us feel like fools because there was “nothing” wrong with it . . . except it wasn’t working. Go figure!
Classic telephone story:
Telephone repairman is drafted and sent to the rifle range. He loads his rifle, assumes the prone position, braces himself carefully, takes a deep breath, exhales part way, waits for the range master to holler, “Ready on the left; Ready on the Right; Ready on the firing line. Fire!”
He carefully squeeze off the shot and sees the red flag of Maggie’s Drawers waving from the pits, signifying a clear miss of the target.
He goes through the same procedure three more times. Same result: Maggie’s Drawers.
Finally, he takes his final cartridge out of his ammo belt, polishes it carefully, then chambers the round. He puts his thumb over the barrel and pulls the trigger, blowing it off in a pink mist.
“Leaving here fine,” he shouts to the range master. “Trouble’s at your end.”
been there ,done that with about 8 companies in the last 25 years here in az. i still don’t know what high speed internet is, and i probably never will. it seems the sun will fry a sat dish in about 3 of our “warm” summer months and then there is the monsoons, then nothing works. but other than that “its a dry heat”