rchandra
Stargate S G-1 And Atlantis Fan
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| reply to DaMaGeINC
Re: hmm
I'd really like to know some percentages of trouble-free vs. troubled customers. Let's see...I'm only one guy in Buffalo, NY, and what's happened with me?
•I had two lines (basically voice and modem), and heck, paying for both, should have always received two directories, more often than not, only received one.
•I decided to keep the modem line as my data line. When I ordered DSL, I specifically did the "self-install" option. I guess they figured that absolutely noone except their own technicians was competent enough to take pair 2 on a jack wired RJ-14 style and feed it to "pair 1" (well, only pair) on the DSL modem, so they scheduled a truck roll. Of course, I was never informed of this, so they charged me with a missed prem visit, something like $75-100 when all taxes and such were added. And the worst thing from an economic standpoint is they still took some $135 out of my bank account despite me immediately pointing out this erroneous charge, and they wouldn't REFUND the money. No, I had a credit balance for the next 3 months where I didn't have to pay. And...they refused to apply this balance to the charges for the line on pair 1. (It is at this point they "lost" the "privilege" of getting to deduct the money directly out of my bank account, which I'm SURE is advantageous for them.)
•Just about every time I would go to their Web site to view the charges detail for my bill, they would claim they're having "technical problems" and they couldn't display my details. I firmly believe their "technical problem" was they couldn't "Web program" their way out of a paper sack to save their lives (ECMAscript and such), and not adhere to standards. Sorry, VZ techies, the whole world isn't IE on MS Windows; there is a significant and thankfully growing fraction of us that are on Linux with FF or MacOS of varying flavors and NS, FF, Opera, or Safari. It's at that point they "lost" their "privilege" of billing me electronically, and that they're going to spend the money to mail me paper every month.
•When they were changing speeds to 3Mbit/s and their billing practices for month-to-month, along with locking me in for another year so that I didn't have to pay + $8/mo. for month-to-month, I had a Dorothy Gale moment where my apartment building was magically transported by that rare Buffalo tornado 4000 more EWL feet away from their wirecenter. So, they decided that due to the "longer" loop, I wasn't supportable at the 1.5Mbit/384Kbit rates that were working just fine for at least a year, so they halved the downstream and cut the upstream by a third (768/128). I know this is probably not true, but I like to think of this as retaliation for disconnecting pair 1 and going VoIP with VoicePulse, because at about 90Kbit/s required for each G.711 leg of a call, and not that I'd do it often at all, 3-way calling was impossible w/o either choppy audio or reduction in quality due to utilizing another codec.
•There was of course that big fiber cut in the Bronx one day that had my (and many other east coast people of course) Internet out for over a day.
•In the guise of wanting to slow a worm, all the sudden servers became illegal and tcp/80 was blocked.
So who knows? Yes, I will agree that when service was operating, it was very good. They do manage their bandwidth better than at the time Adelphia and now Time-Warner, as the speeds were VERY consistent no matter the time of day or night, and the latency was always consistently low that I could tell. But it's incredibly stupid stuff like this that has me scratching my head wondering how it could happen.
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English is a difficult enough language to interpret correctly when its rules are followed, let alone when a writer chooses not to follow those rules.
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