Friday, January 20, 2006

Would you move your house for Verizon?



I've been getting shitty wireless signal lately so I call Verizon to let them know what's hood.

Yesterday, they finally admit to me that their router/modem is buttcheeks and is known for giving off poor wireless signal.

OK, so finally my Internet Service Provider admits that the hardware they use to provide service to the Internet doesn't provide service to the Internet.

What a business model.

So after some more craptacular problems last night, I call back to do the "I'm canceling service of you don't fix this" dance and I get Raghbib, who must have been the greatest tech support drone in existence.

He asked me if the person who told me the router wasn't good, "worked for Verizon" and if I would be willing to "move my microwave or my house" for better service as a real ass question.

wow

The moral of this sad tale is to avoid Verizon if you're going to be wirelessly interwebbing more than 3 inches away from your router.

Verizon's download speeds currently max out at 3 Mbps, opposed to the 10/15 Mbps download speeds cable companies tend to offer.

That's a 45 minute movie download compared to a 10 minute one.

Or a shattered router compared to a working one.

________________________________________________


P.S.
New Bullshit Alert

I've been complaining about slow ass American Internet speeds and expensive prices for a while and now the NY Times is riding with me.
In the U.S. you basically have 6-15 Mbps speeds for about $50 a month.
In Japan and Europe you're getting 25 - 100 Mbps speeds for $25 a month over more reliable lines.

Rather than increasing the download speeds that are available to residential customers, Verizon and other ISP's want to charge major Internet companies such as EBay, Google and Microsoft for special bandwidth allocation for their video services.

Nothing like business stagnation and two-tiered systems.

As much as I hate dial-up, it did allow for a wide range of carriers.
Now you're lucky if you have two choices for broadband in your area.

True broadband speeds are good for more than porn and music pirating. America's slow move to broadband keeps them behind other industrial nations in almost every realm.

A lot of people think, "Why do I need the Internet to be that fast?"
But it isn't so much as what you can use the speed for, as much as it is about what other people can develop once the speed constraints are removed.

But circles seem to be the popular shape in America right now.

That's all the techno-bitching for now.

1 comment:

  1. OH boy, not to sound trite, but don't get me started on Verizon and their crappy service and even worse customer service. I have a similar posting up myself, though mine has to do with phone service. I feel your pain.

    ReplyDelete