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Mr. Luddite[_4_]

On 10/12/2018 11:10 PM, wrote:
On Fri, 12 Oct 2018 18:50:52 -0400, "Mr. Luddite"
wrote:

On 10/12/18 2:37 PM, wrote:

On Fri, 12 Oct 2018 10:18:52 -0400, "Mr. Luddite"
wrote:

On 10/12/2018 9:37 AM, True North wrote:

Cable sucks and is expensive.Â* Young people don't want it. My s9ns
just stream what they want on their computers.
Just recently a competitive competitor to our provider offered us a
deal we couldn't refuse so we changed. The pod providers retention
dept called and admitted they could't compete. Then when taking the
old equipment back to the store...the old guys pulled out the hard
sell...offering to beat our new provider by $15.00 per month. I was
a bit ****ed so we said forget it...we've changed for two years
unless we're unhappy with the new service.Â* I feel sorry for anyone
who doesn't at least try to negotiate with the pirates.

Problem where we live is that Comcast is the only game in town for
Internet service and you need it to stream anything.

The cable TV portion of our monthly bill is very inexpensive for
"enhanced" basic service. The largest part of the bill is for Internet
service.Â* I am not a big movie watcher, so I don't need a bunch of movie
channels.Â* The cable service we have gives us all the Red Sox and
Patriots games plus things like the History Channel, Discovery Channel,
cable news like MSNBC, Fox, CNN, all the local network channels and
about 100 other channels that I never watch.

Mrs.E. likes movies but she just streams them via Netflix, Amazon, etc.
or orders them "On Demand" occasionally.

I am using DSL from the phone company. Comcast reliability is really
bad here. I am going to watch how all of the new "plant" they had to
install after Irma works out but so far it really does not seem to be
making them better. My FIL has Comcast and he uses his Echo/Alexa
thing a lot. He says the Comcast seems to be down a lot. We have not
tried to quantify that but when I had an online weather station I had
to turn off the logs because the hits were filling up the log file too
much. My wife had Comcast at the club, with a high dollar "commercial
grade" account and she was on the phone with them a lot. Part of the
problem is the idiots they have at the call centers. She had the
direct number for the call center manager and it still was not that
great.

We haven't had a Comcast outage since last winter during a heavy
snowstorm in which we also lost power. Comcast was back on-line
a day before the power company restored power. I was able to run
a box and TV off of the generator. Before that I can't remember a
cable outage at all other than an occasional minor blip that might last
15 seconds at most. Picture freezes, then a message appears saying the
cable signal has been interrupted and then it comes back on, all within
a few seconds. It could simply be due to Comcast techs working on lines
somewhere.

I understand Comcast may be the gold standard up north but they are
just the guy, who bought the guy, who bought the guy, down here and
some of their "plant" was left over from South Florida cable 3
companies and 2 hardware generations ago. Irma may have been the best
thing that could have happened to them, assuming they build back new
and not just put another patch on a lousy network.
My neighbor worked for the original company 30 years ago and now he is
a Comcast consultant/contractor that they send when they are fixing to
lose a big commercial customer. What I say is based on what he told my
wife when they sent him to her club. (after the standard pitch)

Similar history of Comcast up here. Comcast today is the result of at
least two acquisitions of smaller cable companies. When cable was first
available back in the late 70's, early 80's it was a small, local
operation called "Cambell Communications". It time it was bought out by
"Adelphia Cable" which in turn was bought out by Comcast.

For years it had shaky service, similar to what you are experiencing in
Florida but then they started what I was told was going to be a national
project to upgrade all their equipment, cables and the equipment in
customer's homes. I think it was when they rolled out the "Xfinity"
name. Anyway, they did and the reliability of their service has been
excellent since.

They now offer three Internet speeds as well for home Wi-Fi. Basic
is 25Mbs. For a faster connection they offer 75Mbs (which I have)
and then a "Blast" service that is over 200Mbs.