gl.

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Tuesday, July 25, 2006

 
11:35 AM: modulation [#] [3]

oh, god. i'd rather go to the dentist than call qwest dsl support again. after over an hour of painful troubleshooting, they essentially said it wasn't their problem and referred me to my isp, easystreet. but i had already called easystreet (who has really great tech support) and THEY said the problem was with qwest! so i bought a new dsl modem just to see if that solves it, because i've gone from one crash a day to one crash every 10 minutes. i can't do -anything- without making the modem crash at this point. it's not the airport, and i can't even get the modem to give valid ips to laptops that are directly plugged in via dhcp.

qwest tech support is obviously foreign in nature. he kept calling me sven because it was too difficult to explain that i was gretchin. i asked what time it was there and it was only an hour later than me. curious, i asked "where are you?" he said, "ma'am, i can't tell you where we are located, but we are a unit of qwest communication and i will be happy to help you." must be a frequently asked question. but while waiting for the modem to "powercycle," i asked him how the weather was. "it looks like it might storm," he said. i said it had been very hot out here. "is it summer there?" he asked. so i guess he's not from around here. finally, after telling me he was very sorry to have to tell me i'd have to contact my isp, he said "ma'am, have you been to the qwest website?" oh, no, i thought. "because i suggest bookmarking it as one of your favorites." oh, no. i really don't think so.

my easystreet support calls, on the other hand, were delightful in comparison. i always walk away from easystreet feeling better, not worse -- even if it's still not entirely working, i feel heard and that the problem was competently reviewed and that's there's a decent next action to take.

a new modem is on its way, but can anyone verify whether comcast has better support? i'd hate to give up easystreet, but we need a faster connection to view all that stopmo animation, anyway, and today i'm loathe to give qwest any more money to upgrade. we're just about to go to canada & i have some stuff i want to wrap up, so the timing on this is terrible. maybe i need to spend some time at a coffeeshop. or at michael's. ;)

Comments:

I have had good experiences with Comcast. Sure, all the hippies will rail against the Big Evil Company (any company will do), but my experience has been pretty seamless, on both PCs and Macs (at the same time) with a wireless net as well. I have used both a Mac and a PC as my primary machine, over the years and configured the cable modem to easily work with both. There is little to no "shared network latency effect" which is a frequent alert, but I use my network for multiplayer gaming (Guild Wars and Halo) and have a very low ping. It is LOTS faster than DSL.

# posted by  The Villager : Tue Jul 25, 03:10:00 PM PDT

 

well, unless you want dialup you'll deal with a Big Evil Company. it's too bad companies who want the market to "take care of itself" lobby against laws that would allow any real competition. i just want to know which is the lesser of evils, and at this point, i am voting for comcast unless anyone has a good reason i should keep qwest/dsl. i know we've talked about this before, but i didn't have to CALL qwest till i couldn't stand it anymore. (i can get connection for about 1-5 minutes after i reboot the modem). i wish easystreet could do cable. :P

# posted by  gl. : Tue Jul 25, 05:13:00 PM PDT

 

I've found Comcast's support to be pretty good.

mb

# posted by  Anonymous : Tue Jul 25, 07:10:00 PM PDT

 

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