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Penny Arcade - Comic - Xfinitesimal
Dog
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Penny Arcade - Comic - Xfinitesimal
Videogaming-related online strip by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. Includes news and commentary.
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"No, they're a monopoly in my area."
"Oh man, you're terminal. I'm so sorry. Here... buy yourself some dinner tonight. This is all I have on me."
-Tycho Brahe
(Though, oddly enough, it is stable. Expensive as hell, but stable. I don't do a lot of online gaming but I do know that I can work for 8+ hours a day from home with a Teams window up the whole time with 5 other people on it, and it's fine. Well, the connection is fine. Teams has all sorts of "episodes.")
pleasepaypreacher.net
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3DS: 3454-0268-5595 Battle.net: SteelAngel#1772
The only thing thats weird about this comic is that in the Seattle area Comcast is still sadly the fastest internet for most people. So that mailman would like also have comcast...
pleasepaypreacher.net
Well, Comcast was pretty widely determined to have the worst customer service in the country. Possibly the universe. But Xfinity? Hardly any complaints at all!
Wait, you say there's a ton of complains for them now? Well, how about this new service Netravesty*?
It may not be just a raw speed thing. When I switched from Comcast to FIOS as soon as I learned it had rolled out to my area the main driver was due to the number of times my service went out under Comcast. It happened once every few months back then, sometimes more often. In the years I've been using Verizon, I've had an average of less than one outage every 2 years. In one case the outage wasn't due to anything on their end but due to landscapers cutting through a cable.
A friend experienced that going the other way. She was renting out her aunt's basement and during some snow storms that knocked out power there had been an issue with autopay for her aunt's Verizon bill that she was unable to check up on. She canceled her service with Verizon out of annoyance and swapped to Comcast and their internet and cable reliability saw issues really quickly, within the first few months. Her aunt quickly regretted the switch but she'd signed a 2 year contract and was stuck.
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3DS: 3454-0268-5595 Battle.net: SteelAngel#1772
pleasepaypreacher.net
Well given that Frontier doesn't offer services in my area but I still hear about them a lot due to lawsuits, big outages, and generally crappy business practices I can see why you might have had issues.
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3DS: 3454-0268-5595 Battle.net: SteelAngel#1772
KEIRAN YOU SON OF A BITCH!
pleasepaypreacher.net
Hopefully I someday get that sweet, sweet municipal fiber.
siiiiigh
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
Ugh, that's the one thing that's worse than paying for Comcast yourself. Then they really know they got you where they want you.
I still miss Speakeasy support, where the first person to answer my call knew what a traceroute was.
*nervously begins tap dancing*
new company name idea: My iZiplyrfy.com On The Web
Gotta say, though, threads like this are not exactly filling me with confidence about making the move. It's really great hearing that what would be a 10x upgrade for me, and the best option I've been able to find for this area and price point, is total shit.
Regulatory capture.
Yeah, that's why I had to reluctantly switch from Speakeasy (DSL) to Comcastxfinity. Speakeasy's just couldn't compete on speed and on prices (they had to pay the telephone company for their equipment, for one thing).
I think it's that, plus building out a network to reach each house. It's a lot more lucrative to be the first company to build out the network than it is the subsequent ones. Especially when you're offering basically the same product. You'd have to have government ownership over a lot of the network to avoid that.
It's one of those industries that feels like it's almost a natural monopoly. The costs to add another network of wires isn't as high as something like a second set of sewer lines or power lines, but it's still a lot of money and work to put more cables into the ground while avoiding all the other cables in the ground from other companies with no guarantee that enough customers of the previous company will be willing to switch over to make it worth the investment. We do have regions where multiple companies have deployed different types of broadband so it's not quite a natural monopoly in my mind but it is in many areas given that things happen like Verizon deciding it's not worth deploying FIOS to more areas that are now stuck with cable as the only viable option.
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3DS: 3454-0268-5595 Battle.net: SteelAngel#1772
and how often is that?
Honestly, about 99% of the time for me. We get a short outage (<30 mins) maybe every few months. Maybe an extended on (>1 hour) once every few years when a storm damages something, or they have to replace some equipment. But I don't discount other areas being a horrorshow. I just say that to show that it can work fine.
of course the industry has deftly avoided being regulated as a public utility and the various improvements they've promised over time have hardly materialized, which leaves us in our current 'shitty service with no options' position.
Fiber rolling out has alleviated the problem in places lucky enough to have it, but that may wind up being a temporary fix as cable steadily dies off.
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
That actually reminds me of another fun discovery about how Comcast did things in Maryland. When I had Fios installed, we discovered that the Comcast tech that had set up their service decided to just slash through existing wiring that was in the way to hook up his own stuff. Some of that wiring had to be replaced in the process of getting setup for FIOS.
Possibly a pathwork fix too. Comcast loves to describe Xfinity as the largest fiber network in their ads around here. While there is some fiber in their network, cable is still a big part in connecting homes to Comcast hubs.
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3DS: 3454-0268-5595 Battle.net: SteelAngel#1772