this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2023
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Last time i moved i got cold called by Comcast to sign up for Internet. I asked them the price, they gave some deal. I asked what will be the price in 2 years when the contract was up. "Oh, well that really depends on what services you sign up for." I tell them i want only Internet at this given speed and i will never sign up for anything else.
...the woman on the phone just stopped talking. I asked can she not tell me the price after all the specials run out and i get my last bill in the contract. She said "i dont know what you want me to say."
Apparently they dont want people to know how screwed you are with Internet. I told the woman that i was going to write a letter letting them know that her inability to answer a simple question was the reason i was not going with their service. She hung up on me. Sent the letter and i got a call a few weeks later asking ifni wanted a super crazy deal they "never give to anyone." I asked my question again and they couldn't tell me my final bill so i hung up and reported the number as spam to my phone carrier.
Stuff like this makes me so glad my town has a local ISP that is competitively priced, works well, and they don't push any sort of deal on you.
The fun part about that is that before they were available in my area, they let my subdivision know that if 40% of us signed up, they would lay fiber in the whole neighborhood and we could choose them over Spectrum. Suddenly, mysteriously, our Spectrum speeds went from a ridiculous 20mbps to a still not great 80mbs. Can't imagine why.
Basically the whole neighborhood told Spectrum to fuck off. Now I have over 300mbps and I could get a faster speed if I wanted to pay for it.
The place i grew up cable wasn't very common. Power and phone on poles, everyone lived far apart and there was only a foot or two of soil before you hit bedrock. The phone lines sucked so much that dialing into BBS and eventually dialup internet was problematic.
I ended up working a summer for an ISP where we used point to point radios to connect to towers 20-40 miles across a lake. Was amazing when people started getting 10mbps. This was all before cellular tethering and satellite was viable options.
Where the fuck is the law.