Broadband Hell
Ever since Rhythms folded, nothing's been the same.
When I was looking for a high-speed internet connection, DSL was the only option. Time Warner, my cable company, had been promising cable modems "next year" for the past five years, and I'd had enough. I surveyed my options, picked Telocity, and enjoyed the speed for just over a year.
First, Northpoint died, then Covad restructured, then Rhythms bit the dust. Telocity got bought out by DirecTV, and re-provisioned me with Ameritech.
The Rhythms line was 768 kbps symmetric, and I was getting a good 85K/sec upstream and down. The Ameritech line was 1500/128 asymmetric, but yielded a 60K/sec connection with outages and high packet loss.
I spent hours on the phone with DirecTV DSL trying to get someone who could help. Eventually, I got through to someone who opened an Ameritech trouble ticket and promised to call back. When he didn't, I visited the Road Runner website, found that they had cable modem service in my area, and opted to have a salesperson call. "Within 24 hours." Nope.
A few days later, I got rather upset and braved the support queue again. This time, I got to talk to an actual Ameritech tech, who zapped something inside the DSL switch, and now I get 75K/s download. It's better, but I'm worried about outages.
So, I'm happily working away in my cube today when the phone rings. It's a Time Warner salesperson who was eager to talk. She rattled off my cable modem options seemingly without ever taking a breath.
"Without a cable TV subscription, a cable modem will cost you $84.95 a month."
I was floored.
"However," she said, "if you have cable TV, it would be only $44.95/month. The cheapest cable plan is $33.57 a month, and that gets you channels 2 through 68, and 77 to 82."
Being the math major that I am, I added that up.
"So it's cheaper to get both cable and a cable modem," I asked, "than to get a cable modem alone?"
"Yes," she said, the absurdity of this apparently lost on her.
"Can you give me some technical information? Speeds, maybe?"
"Sure," she said, launching into yet another pre-written spiel. "You get 5 email accounts, up to 2 Mbps download, and 384 kbps upload. You get a dynamic IP. We do have static IPs available for businesses..." I started fading out.
She went on about installation options and a $14.95 self-install kit, but I knew this was ridiculous. I got rid of her as politely as I could.
Then I realized that I had voice mail. It was from last Wednesday, timestamped at 8:20 pm, and it was the first DSL guy calling back.
"It's 5:20 and I'm calling back about your ticket..."
Geez. Have you ever heard of time zones?