As you may recall, I’m a big fan of the clarity, quality, and variety DirecTV has to offer. Our recent move forced us to switch from DirecTV to Time Warner’s digital cable … and television hasn’t been the same since. Local channels are grainy, and the Time Warner DVR features a terrible user interface, comes with a bewildering remote, and delivers substandard performance. (Voices frequently don’t synch up with lips; recorded shows are frequently mangled or unwatchable.) How we miss our DirecTivos!
Ironically, while the cable people can’t seem to deliver good cablevision … they give great Internet.
Here at the new house, we started out with BellSouth FastAccess DSL. We’ve been DSL customers before, so we have reasonable expectations with regard to speed and performance.
Immediately, though, we noticed our BellSouth DSL here was sluggish and unreliable. Drop-outs were common. Big files trickled down the pipe; uploads took hours longer than they should. After going to numerous speed test sites, we discovered we were getting about one-fifth of the speed BellSouth promised us.
We called BellSouth customer service and confirmed a perception we formed months ago (while getting a business-related DSL issue taken care of): BellSouth DSL Customer Service Agents are clueless. Apparently, they’ve been given a simple flow chart they use to handle every call:
1) Tell customer to restart the computer.
2) Tell customer to check cables.
3) Tell customer “We’ve checked everything on this end, and your DSL is working properly. It must be something you’re doing.”
Following a frustrating call, we decided we were doing something wrong — by subscribing to BellSouth FastAccess DSL.
Within two days, Time Warner hooked us up with a blazing-fast RoadRunner cable modem … and, once again, the Internet is what it ought to be. We’re seeing speeds five to eight times faster than what BellSouth’s mid-level DSL package offered. Files fly up and down the pipe with ease.
We’re so pumped up by the experience, we’re making the jump to the new digital cable telephone service next week … which means, for the first time in our lives, not one penny of our money will be going to feed the BellSouth monster.
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