greatbear | The great disconnect

For the last 4 days I have been laboring through cable internet slowdowns and stoppages that essentially ground me to a halt. The last entries and comments I have made on LJ have been made courtesy of my old standby dialup connection using my ancient Compaq laptop. The phone lines here have deteriorated to the point where all I can manage is a 9600-14400bps connection, if it even manages to connect at all. On the phone with Comcast tech support who say I have decent signal strength but suffering from huge packet losses, which makes sense. The modem is a piece of crap, and my attempts at finding one in various stores tonight was fruitless (unless I wanted to buy some cash-cow device saddled with various internet tele-phoney services). I have to wait till Thursday to have a tech come by to tell me my modem is bad and leave me with one of the horrific little Comcast-branded modems that will end up being even more of a trouble later on. (I speak from experience here).

The semi-good news is that Verizon left a calling card on my door informing me that they will be digging up the neighborhood and upgrading the lines. From what I understand after talking to a phone tech who came by to fix my ailing lines a while back, this is going to be the FiOS fiber-to-the-house service. This is able to carry hugely fast internet, television and phone service over one line. Even if I dont switch my ISP, the competition will be healthy and Comcast will match whatever Verizon offers as far as throughput and price.

If I dont respond to comments and postings, this is the reason. I have more articles coming, an uber-geek post regarding the specs of the new PC (and pictures), plus several other bandwidth-intensive things that have to wait until I have more bandwidth available than the days when I used to ply BBS systems at 2400 baud.

In the meantime, Jeff and I are off to see some independent film about gay cowboys eating pudding. We are hoping to see something about snakes on a plane next.