Grrr! – Broadband in Menlo Park, California SUCKS!
Our AT&T Broadband cable modem has been down for two days. I called AT&T’s customer service last night — they diagnosed it as a problem which will require a truck roll to our home to fix. The earliest they can come is next Thursday morning!
I don’t believe this is a problem with our cable modem (which is about 4 years old). I believe this is a connectivity problem someplace upstream from our home and the modem simply isn’t getting a signal. The rest of our cable TV works fine (at least, as usual) — so the cable itself isn’t the problem.
AT&T’s responsiveness really sucks. But this is a monopoly situation. In our neighborhood, we can only get high speed Internet access from AT&T Broadband. Unfortunately, we live too far from the telco central office to be able to get DSL service to our home. We had ISDN about 8 years ago — maybe it’s time to re-install ISDN — or to move!
There was an article in yesterday’s Wall St. Journal about how broadband is going to be the Bush administration’s major tech initiative this year. Unfortunately, I’ll bet that nothing is really done about the monopoly environment in which we find ourselves.