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Originally Posted by Winni
I had quite a bit of network experience and called Adelphia for service on my Internet connection one day. It's a pretty funny story.
The first tech. walked in and, having done my own trouble shooting I said, "It's my personal cable modem." Tech's answer, "Oh, no! Cable modems never fail. It can't be that!"
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The bottom line is there is still no competition in our basic utilities. You want cable in Alton; you get Metrocast. The end. Only when competition is allowed will we get any improvement.
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I had the same problem with Metrocast tech support when I was living in Lakeport. My Internet connection would go away after 25 minutes on line. After a little troubleshooting I found that the problem was the cable modem. I could almost set a watch by how long it took for the modem to die after powering it up.
They replaced the drop from the street (which needed replacement in any case) and fiddled around with interior wiring. I kept telling them it was a run time error with the modem, either the power supply or a bad solder joint on the modem PCB. Finally, the last tech that was there asked "What are you? Some kind of engineer?" When I informed him that I was indeed an electrical engineer and, in fact, that Metrocast was a customer of ours, he relented and we finally checked out the modem. Twenty-five minutes later he saw that the modem dropped out exactly as I predicted it would.
He changed out the modem. All was right with the webiverse from that point on.
In regards to competition, that may be coming sometime in the (not so) near future.
Should Verizon extend their FiOS service to this area - they claim they will be - they may be able to provide video/CATV services as well. But that may be dependent upon both town franchise contracts with the existing cable MSOs as well as the NHPUC.