Comcast is Lame

I'm sure I'm not the only one who has said this before but Comcast really isn't that great a company. They sent me a card in the mail the other day telling me that they increased my bandwidth and at around the same time, my net performace has suffered and as of yesterday it's been spotty at best. Sure I've got great bandwidth, but it is completely bursty and therefore useless. Let me give you an example about what I'm talking about.

Say you are in Firefox and open up a folder of bookmarks into a set of tabs. This will silmultaniously attemt to open up a set of websites. A few weeks ago when I did that, the sites all opened up within a second or two. Today when I try the same thing, I get a string of tabs with the little "connecting" animation that goes for 10-15 seconds and then poof.. all at once they all come in at the same time. It's as if there is someone holding up my traffic for certain periods of time and then says "ok... go go go.. ok stop again"..

The tv is just as bad.. black screen with tiny short bursts of audio. Since the signal is digital and I would imagine the picure and sound come over tcp/ip as well I would guess that whatever is holding up my net data is holding up my cable data as well. For those of you who don't know, video data is huge and audio data bigger than a normal web page. I would expect the tiny bits of audio to come through in bursts just like my web pages but the video to not come through at all since it's data size is bigger than the turnstile threshold that I'm imagining.

So anyway, we called Comcast yesterday and did the usual "Is your tv turned to the right channel?" blah blah blah troubleshooting and finally they decided to send a technician Tuesday afternoon. How nice.

So now I've got almost useless internet access and no tv for 4 days. On one hand it's nice that I work at home since I don't need to take a 1/2 day to meet the cable guy Tuesday (not to mention that it's not fair that I should even be asked to be available during working hours since it's not my problem the service is fucked up) on the other hand, I can't work for 2 days now since I work at home and depend on a rock solid net connection at all times to support my remote work.

But I've tried DSL and it pretty much sucks so I'm stuck until Verizon gets it's head out of its ass and starts depoying fiber to the homes...

Now lets see how many times I'll have to submit this post before it uploads..