What Comcast Did

Below is an email I had to send to my landlady this winter:

Nikki-

This is what happened last Thursday when Comcast came to visit:

A Comcast technician showed up unscheduled at my door around 11am. Fortunately I was here but needed to leave around noon. The tech explained Comcast had detected a problem with my internet, and it was "reading 60 when it should be reading around 30 or 35." I had no idea what he was talking about but showed him where the cable modem was while I continued to get ready to leave." He hooked up a handheld instrument and took a reading, fiddled around in the apartment and went outside to check the exterior line. He came back up and soon thereafter a second tech showed up in another Comcast van. They looked at all the cables inside the apartment that were here previously and decided they needed to install another line. One of the techs asked where the attic was, and I told him there was a common crawlspace at the top of the stairs, but I didn't know if it was secured or even what was up there. He went and got a ladder while the other tech was outside doing something-I assume getting new cable to run into the apartment.

I was still trying to get ready and could hear one of the techs setting up a ladder and crawling around above. This was about 11:45 and since I didn't want to get in the shower or leave them unattended, I laid on the bed to wait for them to finish. About 5 minutes later the tech's lower leg/knee came busting through the drywall/sheetrock in the ceiling, with insulation, drywall and everything else pouring down onto the bed and floor next to me. He seemed shocked and didn't move for a second, then moved and looked down through the hole at me. I heard him complaining about the flimsiness of the materials of the ceiling, etc...but considering he wasn't on the beams, of course the ceiling gave way; it isn't meant to support weight.

The techs came into the apartment and looked at the mess, talking about how thin the ceiling was, which is, of course to code and standard building material. There was a gigantic mess in my apartment, the hallway, and stairwell. One tech packed everything up at that point, while I gave the other your name and phone number. He said the house doctor woul;d be out the next day to make repairs and they would cove rup the hole, which was approximately 2-1/2 ft x 1-1/2 ft, and a long crack going down the side of the ceiling/wall. He gave me a work order to sign, still not really knowing what they did or exactly why they were at the apartment in the first place. Since it was then noon and I was late, I signed it. I then checked my internet connection, and they hadn't hooked it back up or checked to see if it even worked in their haste to get out of the apartment quickly. I chased them down and told them it wasn't working, and one came back up, connected the cables and tested my connection and left. It appears they took the cover to the entrance of the attic and used it to put over the hole, as they left the attic unsecured not to mention the entire mess they created.

I returned last night (Sunday) and the mess was still all over my apartment and the attic was still wide open and nothing had been touched. I haven't heard from Comcast since.

If you need any further details or any other aspects of what happened, please let me know.

Thanks!
Michael

Verizon MiFi Review

Disgusted with Comcast and faced with the prospect of being in remote areas and places that don't have internet access, my girlfriend and I got a MiFi.

We've had it for several months and used it quite a bit. Here's the lowdown:

You can have up to 5 computers use this as an access point. I believe you are allowed something like 8 gigs of downloading, which isn't nearly enough. The salesperson told us he could download 5 full-length movies in HD with no problem, which obviously was a lie. Verizon sales associates may know cool tricks and apps for their phones, but I haven't seen a lot of IT knowledge displayed by that crowd. Long story short: We downloaded .pdfs and maybe a few other things and went over the allotment to the tune of several hundred dollars.

It's slow. We regularly have 2 laptops using it, and often cannot have one person doing something such as streaming music without the other seeing a loss in speed. I never did a download/upload test, but it's about half as fast as my home connection, which by many measures is slow as well.

The battery lasts about 3 hours, so it must be charged regularly. We usually just leave it plugged in when using it near a plug, but one of the great features, that despite the shortcomings make this a great product nonetheless, is that it can be used anywhere you can get a signal. Verizon has a great network and is one of the reasons I've been a customer for so long, so only in the true outback of Alabama can I not receive a signal. This sole aspect made it a winner when I was traveling back and forth to Montgomery and my PhD student girlfriend and myself, a student at the time, needing access to lots of information at all times. Graduate school is a lot of work at all hours, and we've both passed the point of feeling something is amiss if we're off the grid, I'm sad to admit. I have a BlackBerry Tour 9630, which solves a lot of problems, but it has its limitations of course.

The MiFi is about the size of a thick credit card, so it fits easily in a pocket. The Verizon MiFi also can slide or fall right out of a pocket, and is made from a slick plastic material, so be careful. These are expensive items, although we found it for $50, with a contract of course. I think if one were to buy it outright with no hooks or contracts it's around $500. It would be nice if mobile phone co's could rely on their outstanding service and low costs to keep their customers instead of legally binding them for up to two years.

Overall, if you need the internet at all times or even just rely on it heavily for light work such as searches and general surfing it's a great product. If you need it for downloading files, streaming, or just heavy data usage, you may be SOL, or at least annoyed by having to work with a connection reminiscent of dial-up.

In the end, she had to crawl back to Comcast and dig out her cable modem  again. But we still use the MiFi for traveling, and it's about to save us $10 night when we're in a hotel next week in Portland and hanging out in airports, both which charge for internet usage, sadly.