The great disconnect

[greatbear]

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.

Comments

[md-mancub.livejournal.com]

I ordered FiOS the other day.

I feel horribly guilty about it; I've been a faithful Speakeasy DSL customer for years. But, the FiOS deal is hard to pass up: More than twice the speed I'm getting now (15 Mbs/2 Mbs vs 6 Mbs/768 kbs) for less than half the cost. *sigh*

Anyway, my install date is in about 10 days. I'll let you know how it goes.

[ciddyguy.livejournal.com]

Oh how I know about internet connection woes. Been there, done that, but with dialup, bad service from AOL and later a local ISP and I think a modem crapping out (a 28.8 jobbie in an old 486 PC). This was of course back in the late 90's mind you.

I currently have up to 5G's of DSL for $26 a month for the next year which is an upgrade to my previous connection speed of 256K.

Oh, the modem I use is from a company called Actiontec that Qwest sells. Works fine so far.

[le-lapin.livejournal.com]

[beastbriskett.livejournal.com]

Hope your forced intenet fast is over soon!
Lookin' forward to your take on the puddin'.

[nfotxn.livejournal.com]

Is your current modem one provided by Comcast or a generic DOCSIS one you bought? 'Cause if they've configured their TTL or packet size differently or any other IP tweak and your modem hasn't got that update it's likely that is the problem.