Flaky Connections
My Internet has been iffy all day. The official non-explanation mentions “not being able to browse” when in fact it is a DNS failure. I can “browse” the contents of my own system to my heart’s content, but their bloody domain name server can’t find their own site with a searchlight and service dog.
While I’m on it. When you want a support site, it doesn’t mean a sales support site, it means information for what you have already sold someone.
That satellite antenna is looking more and more reasonable.
4 comments
DNS fails repeatedly here, every time the power glitches… and in Houston, that’s pretty often. DNS continues to work, sort of, if I don’t mind waiting 2 minutes for it to look up google.com .
Yes, I know; I need a new UPS to avoid the glitches, but getting to Micro Center isn’t exactly easy for me these days.
If I call AT&T, they follow their script, first telling me to pull all the connections to the modem and remove the router from the system… AAUUGGHH! What part of “it was working 30 seconds ago” do they not understand?
I fear the U.S. is going to pay, in the international market, for its failure to promote stable, reliable, affordable internet connections. I am paying the top monthly rate for a connection that is theoretically the fastest an individual household can have… but it’s only that speed when it’s up and running. Often enough, it isn’t.
Don’t rush on the UPS. There’s nothing wrong with mine, and I have everything plugged into an isolated circuit that has nothing to do with anything else in the house. The UPS clicks away all day during the summer, because of air conditioning in the area pulling huge loads,
The problem was their equipment, not mine, and it appears to be caused by a lack of filtering on their end. I don’t think they are spending the money on isolation transformers at their switching locations, something that Ma Bell did as part of their standard design, and they are paying the price for the crummy electrical service in this country. Watching the voltage swings common in this area is a clear demonstration of the level of cost cutting that has gone on to increase profits. Routine maintenance is not being done, and replacement equipment is not as good as what it is replacing.
You can get a T! for $50/month in large cities in Mexico, but standard DSL ends up costing $100/month in the US. It’s all about milking the maximum profit out of the system, not about serving the needs and desires of customers.
The United States has a third-world Internet infrastructure. Just sayin’. Other nations have fiber to the household and 100Mbit/sec Internet access, we’re still on freakin’ tin cans and strings here in the USA, because nobody wants to invest the money to upgrade when they have a monopoly and thus people don’t have any choice but to use their monopoly service. And they do everything possible to make sure it *remains* a monopoly service by getting laws passed outlawing competition — specifically, competition from government-created Internet entities such as the City of New Orleans’ city-wide wireless network, or outlawing the City of Wilson’s city-owned FIOS network.
Corporate control of America is a direct trip to the 3rd world, yet the majority of the sheeple still believe government, not corporations, are the problem. Despite the fact that they’re getting raped and reamed by corporations at every turn, whether it’s rapacious payday loan vendors, banksters nickle and diming them to death with fees, agricultural conglomerates feeding them poison food, whatever, in their delusional brains corporations are the solution, not the problem, despite every bit of evidence to the contrary. It is to laugh… or would be, anyhow, if not for the fact that we have to live here in this swiftly declining and falling-apart nation…
– Badtux the Unincorporated Penguin
When I first moved down here the local cable company was Time-Warner. After a few years they decided to switched to fiber and offer telephone and Internet in addition to cable service, but they had only finished the main line installation when there was deal that changed the cable system to Cox. Apparently they swapped some service areas.
One of the first things Cox did was to pull out all of the fiber.
I have fiber bundles not 75 feet from my front door, but there is no way to access them. Sprint installed them, but they only sell and/or lease lines to the military. I spent 18 months trying to get fiber for a project and Sprint wouldn’t even talk about it, much less give me a price. As a true-blue capitalist I get really suspicious when people refuse to sell me things that I know they are selling to others.
The state of Florida has had fiber installed on the rights of way of the Interstates, but no one sells access to it. If you’re a large corporation you can attach to it, but no one else, even though it was put down by the state.
This reliance on “private industry” is really a farce. Every time they deregulate something in this country, we end up with near monopolies, higher prices, and no competition.
We are all supposed to clap our hands and believe so the free-market fairy can work her magic, just like Reagan promised.