wrote:
On Sat, 13 Oct 2018 17:53:22 -0000 (UTC), Bill
wrote:
wrote:
On Sat, 13 Oct 2018 03:40:23 -0000 (UTC), Bill
wrote:
wrote:
On Sat, 13 Oct 2018 00:10:07 -0000 (UTC), Bill
wrote:
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.
Depends on location. When we moved in to this house in 1979. Cable was
not very good. Our area was one of the first areas to get cable back
then. By 1980’s cable had lots of problems. A few years ago, they
installed all,new cable, and is rarely a problem.
The opposite was true with us. Sprint bought my phone company 25 years
or so ago and they ran new underground fiber to the hubs and new
underground CAT 3 to everyone.
My DSL is a solid 10mb 24/7
The cable guys acted like their coax was already all the bandwidth
they could ever use so they didn't do anything. It is still on poles
tho so any little blow takes it out and a lot of that 40+ year old
cable is starting to show it' s age. Until they give a ****, it won't
get better.
Our lines were always underground.
Power and TV cable is still on poles here.
There are places that have everything underground but only new
communities. We are the oldest community in the area.
We were built in the early 1970’s.
Estero River Heights was incorporated in 1956 and my house was built
in 63. These are all "on your lot houses", there was never a master
builder. No two houses are alike here.
Power (and TV cable) is overhead but phone is all underground.
The only reason my phone and DSL was out is the fiber to copper
conversion up at the end of the street is powered by the utility and
they were down. The battery lasted about 30 hours and a few days later
they dropped a generator up there.
There were stories of vigilante homeowners, cracking into the boxes
and hooking it up to their generator. Evidently it runs on a 5-15
plug. I would have done it if the box was in front of my house.
Unfortunately POTS is not really that same old "plain" that it used to
be. No more running the whole system from a central office battery.
There are some same houses, but when they developed the land, was a large
area. Was rural area. Fairly rural still in 1979. Only 24,000 people,
now near 80,000. Was safflower fields where is now a large mixed
industrial / housing area. Headquarters of ATT, Peoplesoft, etc. one of
the two main roads is Hopyard Blvd. when I moved here, was friends with a
90 year old guy who was born here. He said he was one of the kids in the
tree in the movie Rebecca of .sunny brook Farm. Filmed on 2nd street. He
said they rowed down Hopyard in the winter as was flooded. And grew hops
for Guinness among others. Hops and cattle.