Vaudeville was here, vaudeville is gone

[austin_dern]

I don't think it's a secret that we're staying with our current ISP primarily out of spite. We've got DSL, delivered through copper wires, and AT&T does not want to do that anymore. They keep begging us to switch to fiber optic, but since fiber optic won't actually deliver any higher speed, we're holding out on copper so they have to keep maintaining those wires. Besides, the real problem is that since we're in a working-class neighborhood with a lot of rental properties they don't want us as customers and want to shove us off on someone else, which is surely why we can't get any faster service by fiber optic.

They seem to be aware we'd dump them except for the hassle of getting a replacement, probably cable, installed, and because it'd be a sentimental pity for the old Ameritech e-mail address to die. The past week, particularly, the Internet's been sluggish and while an annoyed call to their help line --- the one with a voice menu system that could not understand what I said, even though I have the lightest New Jersey accent known to humanity --- helped with the speed in the same ways that turning the modem off and on would have done, it hasn't helped reliability any. We've been losing connections a couple times a night and that gets old really fast.

When this happened in the past the eventual excuse AT&T delivered was that wind was blowing on wires, which makes sense because wind is the traditional enemy of electromagnetism. Conceivably since the weather is finally warming up and Michigan is flooding this is behind some or all of our current problems, and a week or two will let things naturally clear up. Or we'll just have more of this.

Trivia: Brooklyn's 8 April 1834 charter, incorporating it as a city, forbade the city government from regulating the price of any commodity except bread, and prohibited it from infringing on any chartered rights of the City Corporation of New York. Source: Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898, Edwin G Burrows, Mike Wallace.

Currently Reading: Dimensional Methods and their Applications, Charles M Focken.

PS: Reading the Comics, March 10, 2015: Shapes Of Things Edition, third mathematics post since the last roundup. In this one I talk a bit about vectors and how to describe shapes with them. As ever, these can be sent to your Friends page or your RSS reader.

Comments

[c-eagle.livejournal.com]

Good for you, bud! That fiber thing can be good, but they manage it so poorly, especially with the subcontracted installers.. ;P

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I haven't got strong feelings one way or another about fiber, but if it isn't going to be any faster than what we've got, it's hard to see what the point is supposed to be.

[porsupah.livejournal.com]

That rather surprises me. Here, we're on FTTC/VDSL, which offers up to 80Mbits/sec in, if you're close enough, but we still get about half that, for a delivered throughput of about 5Mbytes/sec in, 700Kbytes/sec out. With ADSL2, we were more around 700Kbytes/sec in. Presumably they're just throttling?

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I don't know what their problem is, really, apart from my contention that they don't want to serve this neighborhood and so are hoping to do as little as possible without actually violating any regulations enough that they get dinged for it. These were probably decent DSL speeds at one time, but that was a long time ago.

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

As I understand it, we are too far from the node to get any better than their alleged 3 megabit service (which actually comes in around 2 to 2.5). They will sell us their next-gen service which is fiber-to-node, but they still will only offer the same speed we get now. They keep trying to tell me to 'upgrade' to it but how's it an upgrade when they admit that it isn't any faster? Feh.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Which, as far as I'm concerned, is good enough reason to stick to copper. They can suffer along with us.

[porsupah.livejournal.com]

Oy, subcontractors! Had one for our FTTC/VDSL installation, and they were all ready to give up as unable to find the cabinet (!), before I more or less begged them to persist, as I needed the bandwidth for work - and I did, as I was on the vector video project at the time, shuffling quite large files to and fro. So, I hopped in the van, and we soon found it. ^_^

If that hadn't happened, it probably would've been a couple weeks more before a new appointment!

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I actually could use a bit more bandwidth for work --- I do mostly programming over logmein, and that's tolerable but a bit sluggish --- although I haven't tried pushing the idea that work might pay for a higher-speed connection for me.