More Broadband Horror Stories

My post last Friday about our Comcast troubles appears to have struck a chord with several listeners, and I thought I’d share a few things here, including a photo of our “Third World Wiring.” (Comcast is on the left, with the splitter dividing the signal between apartments. The gray cables on the right are for my housemate’s satellite TV.)

One long-time reader wrote in with the following story:

You have brought up the important point of having a backup broadband service, especially for businesses which rely on broadband for day to day work. When my neighboring office had problems with DSL, it took four business days to get it fixed. Out of this was 2 days spent at the local telco office where they had to replace the circuit board and wiring.

With all the improvements in technology, the telco office still functions like the days of old with a lot of bureaucracy thus delays. They also do not work on week-ends. Mind you, the office was located 10 miles from the international headquarters of the largest US telephone company. Other than the toll free number, which is answered from anywhere in the East or West coast or half-way around world, there is no way to contact anyone higher up. Everyone in the HQ is hiding behind unlisted telephone numbers, while heading the worlds largest telco.

A combination of cable and dsl is perhaps the ideal combination if broadband is essential for your business. You may want to research how the cable and telcos deal with small businesses which have a need for non stop broadband service. May be we should invite feedback from users with their experience. It would also be a good forum to vent our bad experiences both with cable cos and telcos so it may draw someone’s attention to the issue.

We could be here a long time, and get pretty far off-topic, if every reader of this blog and the e-zine used the comments field to vent about hassles with ISPs. If you’ve got an especially good one, you’re welcome to send it in, but I’d appreciate any focus on how it affected your backup system.

And it seems someone else has found a more dramatic way to get Comcast’s attention. Back in August, a 75-year-old woman smashed a Comcast manager’s equipment after having her service cut off. (He’s lucky, actually, that the only equipment she applied the hammer to was on his desk.)

On a lighter note, there’s the Onion’s wonderful parody news item about the loss of all online data after a whole-Internet crash.

Breaking News: All Online Data Lost After Internet Crash