| At an impass with Grande after a month of bickering About a month ago my Internet service became very erratic. I called up tech support and one support guy told me that he just received word that there was a major rebalancing going on and that customers like me would have a problem for a few weeks.
The rebalncing was over, my pings and the result of speedtests to their servers was all over the place, with downloads from 5 kbs to 14 mbps and uploads from 4 kbs to .9 Mbps. I'm on a plan that offers me 12 Mbps down, 1 Mbps up.
The network people kept working on rebalancing and my speeds became consistent. My downloads are blazing 26 Mbs but my uploads are around .6 Mbs. I'm more interested in uploads because I do a lot of off-site backups.
Tech support/field service decided that this must be a cable problem, so they scheduled a contractor to come and replace my cable. Nice idea but I'm on the 3rd story of an apartment. The apt manager said no way. The contractor did find a conduit full of water. He emptied out the water, replaced the cable. Tech support said everything looked fabulous from their end, run a speed test. 457 kbps.
I can't get to a real technical person to explain to me how a cable could slow down uploads but allow 3 X faster than advertised downloads. It's a single cable, bi-directional.
I'm now at a standstill. Grande says it's my problem because I can't convince the landlord to allow them to run new cable through 3 apartments. I asked for a rebate and reduce fee for my Internet. The supervisor I just spoke to said that .6 Mbs is as fast as anyone would wnnt, so it's not likely I'll get anymore done and not likely I'll get a rate reduction on what I'm paying.
This is one very stupid company. I've dealt with Time-Warner and they were Einsteins compared to Grande's tech support people and supervisors. Rudeness is the order of the day from tech support reps and their supervisors. |
