Yesterday, I rolled out of bed all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed (read: exhausted and just wanting to go back to sleep) and plopped down in front of my Mac to start working, just like every other business day. Except, I couldn’t connect to AIM, my work email address, or my work support tool. Everything else seemed to be working though, which was kind of odd. Called my coworker; he said he wasn’t having any trouble, so it had to be on my end.
So I power-cycled my router.. and then couldn’t get to anything on the interwebs. Ok… pick up the phone and call Verizon. Half an hour later, somebody finally picks up the phone and informs me that they’re having outages and that it’ll be working again by the end of the day, get off my phone. Swell. So I packed up and went to a coffee show to hijack some wifi so I can, you know, do my job.
Over 24 hours later, my internet is still not working. I am not a happy camper, at all. I tried calling again this morning and got a busy signal. a;sldkfjgh.
So I’m at the coffee shop again. You know, being here just isn’t fun when I *have* to be. I want to go home!
The most annoying parts are: 1, there is NO INFORMATION ANYWHERE about what the hell is going on and why they haven’t fixed it yet, and 2, this is the second time in less than a month that my internet has been down for an extended period of time. Last time, they had a maintenance guy working on the hubs out on the street, and he unplugged my connection and plugged it back into the wrong slot. I called within 10 minutes of my internet dropping (and we know about the hub maintenance because my boyfriend saw the guy outside and asked what was going on) and it took them 7 hours to send somebody to fix it. It took him 2 minutes. You know, I’m pretty sure the guy that broke it in the first place was still there when I called, and yet I had no internet for my entire work day.
Verizon.. seriously? I kind of hate you. I expect to be prorated for these internet-less days.
Don’t even get me started on what I think of the cell phone they sold me and the issues I’ve had with my mobile services; then I’ll never stop.
—————————————————————————
Update: 3:30pm 07/09/09
After spending an hour on the phone troubleshooting stuff, my ticket got escalated and all they figured out was that there was some weird DNS issue going on (which is what Vista’s network diagnostic has been saying all along) and they have no idea why. Somebody will call me “eventually”.
So I cheated and manually set my DNS configurations to “somewhere else” after I got off the phone, and now I have internet. No thanks to Verizon.
You are lucky because you know about these things. Just imagine how stuck someone who has no technical knowledge of computers/networks would be!
At least you have access again! Yay you!
Clear. If you’re in coverage area, it just works. If you are in Beaverton/Hillsboro, you’re in the coverage area. FIOS has a better top end right now but in the long run 802.16m will blow the lid off the bandwidth bucket (it will be a few years before 300Mbps, so don’t give up your faster connection if you absolutely need it).
Pay the $35 bucks fee and you are month to month with no commitments. You can get the $20/mo supercheap 768k for your house to start out to see what you think (open a box, plug it in, wait for lights to stop blinking, oh hai we has an interwebs) but for another $20 or so you can get a USB stick that will give WAN BB goodness to whatever boxen it gets stuck in. And those are all faster plans.
Once you have it you’ll be pissed when you have to go somewhere that doesn’t. It’s that cool. On the way to a campout in Mill City (out on the Santiam River) my kids had 3mbps all the way down HWY 213 until just past the Safeway in Molalla (that’s pretty much the boonies). Make sure you try Big Burger if you’re out that way, by the way…Just great food.
Oh and I found you via your restaurant reviews and there was a link to your blog. I’m always mildly interested in that sort of thing and then I saw your post…so…thought I could maybe help out. If you’re as internet dependent as everyone else these days, Clear is the way to go as long as you stick to coverage areas. It’s like a cell phone, but they’re still putting up towers for a few years before it will be everywhere – still really, really new stuff.
But really, really good if you get it.