Uploads from Jami Dwyer — 2 weeks ago
Jami Dwyer posted a photo:
Comcast is evil*, so I decided to pay a substantial premium for Qwest DSL. The premium ended up being more than a week of my life spent as an Internet cafe vagrant. Three times, Qwest gave me "start dates" three days in the future. On the first start date, we had a blinking green light meaning no DSL. I don't remember why we agreed to wait another three days with no hard feelings. The next time, we discovered that they had never put our apartment number on our order. We waited another three days for that fix to go through. Day 9: blinking light; no service. After nine days and three broken promises, they promised to send a guy to check our lines the next day "between ten and two -- don't call us; we'll call you".
So I waited for the line guy, looking out the apartment window every two minutes for a Qwest van, with the sinking feeling that comes from being chumped a fourth time.
And a Comcast van pulled in. Our apartments have just been remodeled, so a lot of the people here are just moving in. One of our new neighbors had, wisely, called Comcast.
I called Qwest to try to get some reassurance that a line guy really was on his way. They put me on hold and hung up on me. I called back and while I was on hold, I asked the (very nice!) Comcast guy if he had any spare modems and if so could he set us up, too. He did. I canceled Qwest. An hour after the Comcast guy set us up, around 1:47 p.m., a Qwest line guy called.
My Comcast connection is blazing fast right now (my podcast downloads never dip below 500 Kb/second now). But given their past behavior, I live in fear that Comcast will just decide they don't like what I'm doing on the Internet, and they'll choke me down, with no recourse for me but another experience with Qwest's three-ring circus.
Duopolies suck. It would be nice if Portland gets more fiber optic cable and revives public wifi somehow. Sure, public wifi didn't work very well as it was originally set up. But it's no reason to dismiss the idea forever.
*I've used Bit Torrent only once, to download Linux, which is completely legal and legitimate, but a company willing to pretend they're me to stop one type of Internet traffic probably doesn't mind doing it with other types of traffic. In our last apartment, my completely legal and legitimate podcast downloads using a Firefox extension called DownThemAll almost never got above 20 Kb/second, 500 times slower than what my housemates and I were paying for.
Jami Dwyer posted a photo:
Jami Dwyer posted a photo:
Jami Dwyer posted a photo:
Jami Dwyer posted a photo:
Jami Dwyer posted a photo:
Jami Dwyer posted a photo:
Jami Dwyer posted a photo:
Jami Dwyer posted a photo:
Jami Dwyer posted a photo:
Jami Dwyer posted a photo:
Jami Dwyer posted a photo:
Jami Dwyer posted a photo:
Jami Dwyer posted a photo:
Jami Dwyer posted a photo:
Jami Dwyer posted a photo:
Jami Dwyer posted a photo:
Jami Dwyer posted a photo:
Jami Dwyer posted a photo:
Jami Dwyer posted a photo:
