Matts ranting on getting high speed

[randall]

Holy crap. Yeah, that sucks.<br><br>I was there. AT&T said our house was 75 feet from their service area. I said, "well hell, how about if I run a line out 75 feet and you guys hook it up for me?"<br><br>They said NO.<br><br>I finally looked online- some website provided info on High Speed access, including the service areas. I found that AT&T covered an area including my house.<br><br>I called up AT&T and told them what I had found. They actually ADMITTED I was right and sent a guy two days later to hook me up. I have been happy as hell ever since.

[Matt Keys]

hmm, havent called att in a while, im gonna give em a ring tommorow. *crosses fingers*

[Matt Keys]

Okay, let me start of by saying that I am pissed and I thought what better place to relieve anger than the message boards:)<br><br>I have been trying to kick this crappy Dial up internet for about 6-8 months. I have had the worst experience with trying to get high speed in my area. The ironic thing is, the area of Michigan I live in is supposed to have the best coverage for this type of thing in the state.<br><br>So we start off with roadrunner cable modem. Across the street from me it is available, So I call up the local cable modem company and ask them about it. They tell me that the wires in my area are outdated and cant handle the service, UGH, if it wasn’t so much I would just hook someone across the road up with the service and 802.11 like that one guy did, you know him. Anyways, they plan to fix the wires next summer or something, I cant wait that long.<br><br>So I start looking around, and I hear about "direct pc" from the direct TV people. I investigate for a bit and there is like a 100 bucks for the satellite and 50 a month. Perfect I think to myself. Then I find out that you still need to use your phone line to request the data or some crap, which means we need a second line, and that adds another 20 bucks a month. So my parents decide its to much money.<br><br>I start to look at DSL, I call the big companies around here, and after being shot down by 3 or so, Earthlink says they can cover me. I rejoice, finally high speed. They even throw in the hardware and installation for free. So we send them the check and wait for them to come out and set us up, and we keep waiting. Eventually I call and ask what the hell is going on, apparently they can’t provide to us for some weird reason they didn’t explain. And instead of calling us, they email me to keys@earthlink.com, an address that I don’t have access to! Idiots!<br><br>Some time passes and I read about a local company that is providing high speed wireless internet via 802.11, once again I rejoice. Not only is it high speed, its techy;) So I call them and get on the waiting list. Two months later they are ready to do "site surveys" I will let you guess how that turned out, yep my darn trees are to tall and they can’t get a signal. If it were up to me I'd chop them down. They don’t give up hope yet, and say it’s all about finding a gap in the trees. So they reschedule for another date, that date comes, and they just don’t show up. I call and start bitchin' and they tell me that its not going to work, Yeah thanks for letting me know~.<br><br>So I tried every number in the yellow pages under internet provider last week. Everyone checked out my address and said the inevitable, NO. But one guy told me that Covad could supply to my address, eureka! So I call up covad, and I talk to their sales guy, he throws me his pitch and all. And it turns up it IS available. So we start working out the details, and its 220 for the hardware! My parents will not pay 220 for hardware! So I get dealing with this guy, and he see's that a reseller of covad is running a deal on it that will get me installation and the modem for free, cool right? Well it just so happens that reseller is Earthlink, the people who thought they could provide to me but really couldn’t! those nazi bastards! So, I explain to this covad guy my situation and he figures it out. So since really covad and earthlink are basically the same thing, I ask him to give me the deal that earthlink is running, after 15 minutes of talking to this guy he has given me no deal. And when I ask for someone who is in the position to make deals, he says nobody is.<br><br>WHAT A LOAD OF CRAP. I am now stuck with my freakin dial up as I started with. And BTW, my dial up people just raised our bill from 15 a month to 25 a month! We wont be sticking with them. They have the nerve to charge us 2 bucks for our bill!<br><br>I am stepping off my soapbox so to speak, I feel a little better now, thanks for listening.<br><br>

[Matt Keys]

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention something. When I was listening to that covad guys sales pitch, he was like, "do you have a website? We even through in 15MB of storage for your website." I was like, yes I do have a website, he started telling me about all the features it comes with. I tell him how many Gigabytes we use up a month, he got real quite, I couldnt help but laugh:)

[TBone]

On the DSL thing, that can get pretty interesting. I worked for the local phone/cable/net monopoly in my county this summer, selling DSL, and there are a lot of bizarre restrictions on it. For example, we could offer it if the customer was close (18k feet) to a Central Office (C.O.) or to a particular type of switch in the field, one called an AFC. If, however, you were on a MUX switch or a PBX switch, you were out of luck. Even on the AFCs and the C.O.s, there were oddities, like you could be up to 21k feet away IF the line was unloaded--that is to say, if it didn't have booster coils wrapped around it to give it better telephone reception. I guess the boosters flattened out the 4kHz band used by DSL. Weird shit.

[Turnip]

I'm digging the /<-rad sig, Thomas.

[Moose or Chuck]

:-/ My dsl sux. So be happy.

[Diego Cueva]

My adsl stinks.. Long live to Dial up

[randall]

where's the tilde?

[Diego Cueva]

~~~~

[Moose or Chuck]

mine would be good, but 640kbps down 128 up. WTF 10k/s UP!!!!!!!!!! AAARGGGGGHHHHHH!!!!!!

[Matt Keys]

Randall, you may not realize it, but you just helped me get dsl:) Although it could still get messed up like with earthlink, I called AT&T and they provide to me. And their hardware is only 100, so we will see how this one goes. BTW, do you have any complaints with your service?

[Moose or Chuck]

Matt, I don't care. I haven't been able to get high speed internet for 3 years. I'm literally 200 yards from the exchange box where they hook up the DSL, but theres "a loop in my line" so they can't. They won't fix it, and they won't tell me what that means.<br><br>Then i was going to get 45MB/sec Wireless T3 for free, but that company went under before it even started servicing.<br><br>Cable internet won't be here for another year, although I do get Digital Cable TV, just not internet. <br><br>So don't bitch about it to me Matt, I'm a whole lot worse off than you.

[Matt Keys]

How does that make you worse off than me? If anything, were equal

[randall]

I love the AT&T service. It is stable, and I haven't had any problems. I haven't even called AT&T with a problem since I hooked up with them.<br><br>Service does vary though. In Seattle we were getting close to a T1, CONSISTENTLY. Here is Spokane, it isn't nearly as fast.<br><br>I also used RCN in New York. They were reliable as well.