At 5:16 am, the internet died. Not for you, perhaps, but at Casa de SJ. No reason. It was just gone, which wasn’t exactly shocking as it disappears three or four times a week, for an hour or so, regularly. It’s been this way since Altice USA purchased Cablevision in 2016.
They still call the service Optimum, but the name is aspirational. It’s not a matter of a cable company being callous toward its customers, as was the hallmark of Cablevision’s service, but that they no longer deliver. The downside of a connected world is when the company you pay to provide the connection simply fails to deliver regularly, there isn’t much to be done.
I’ve called Altice about this many times. The initial call gets a recording, after the requisite 17 minutes of voice tree branches, irrelevant dialogues and self-promotional nonsense, that informs you that they were experiencing higher than normal volume and offers you the choice of either waiting for a customer service representative or having them call you back when a CSR is available. I’ve tried both.
When they tell you the wait time is 17 hours, 43 minutes, they’re underestimating. When you get the call back the next day, the answers are still unavailing. After running through the normal reboot advice and explanation with either a Bangalore or Philipino accent about how it must be something you did, you finally get to the nitty gritty: “Well, we tested your line and everything appears to be working fine now.”
You call the first time.You call the second. If you’re really bored, you call a third, but then you realize that this isn’t a good use of your time. The alternative, at least around Casa de SJ, is Verizon FIOS, On the one hand, FIOS is more expensive. On the other hand, FIOS is similarly unreliable. Do not tell me how much you love them. I used them for a while, and that’s why I now use Altice. There is no other alternative here.
How is it possible that there is no serious competition to provide internet service? It’s a good question, to which the only answer I’m aware of is that by internet providers not poaching each other’s customers, each gets to enjoy their cash machine unmolested. Everyone needs internet access, and it’s not as if most of us can manage without it. In any event, I need it, so even if you can, I don’t care.
Accordingly, there are no posts this morning because Altice failed to provide me with internet access during the period when I read about things that are happening in the world. Then again, there isn’t much happening of interest aside from nonsensical claims of vote fraud by Trump, petulant firings of dubious purpose and vapid cries of conspiracy by hysterics. They will pass soon enough, sound and fury signifying nothing.
But in this void, I can offer this open letter to a company whose only consistent skill is billing.
Dear Altice,
You suck.
Your pal,
Scott
If you have nothing more productive to do with your time, feel free to use the comments to discuss why mail-in voting violates the Equal Protection Clause. I would add “wrong answers only” but there are no other kinds of answers. It’s dead.
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We have lost humility as a people.
I do not understand this obsession with fraud and conspiracy theories about voting when the most obvious and crucial question is:
How has COVID not eliminated the scourge that is warm water, virus distributing death machines?
You know what I’m talking about…
I blame Big Dryer
Jesus SHG, talk about something important for a change!
I admire your persistence in your hand dryer jihad. I wish you luck as they are the very embodiment of evil.
I’m sorry about your internet, sir. Monopolies are terrible.
And because the ones who own your lines resell to competitors, even if you found a third party who could provide you service, they still go to the incumbent for repairs.
I hear they offer a satellite Internet thing in remote places; I can’t imagine you live anywhere remote in New York State, but that might be an option all the same. 25 to 100 megs isn’t _terrible_ I guess.
Good luck.
Have I ever mentioned that I really hate it when people offer unsolicited suggestions because I’m so fucking stupid I wouldn’t have a clue what other possibilities are available?
Yup, many times. I brought it up because I, personally, am fucking stupid and had never considered the mentioned option when I was in a similar situation. I’m full of useless shit like that; it’s a god damned gift.
I think most people reading this feel your pain. Different demons; same hell.
For the few who don’t: you don’t know how lucky you are.
No doubt. I’m one of those jerks who complains, and often get some resolution even if inadequate. I fear that too many have either given up or are Millennials who feel that complaining makes them a jerk for reasons that elude me. They pay for services and think businesses are doing them a favor by delivering what they pay for. I can’t explain it.
But as long as people are willing to pay and get treated like dirt for it, businesses will continue to appreciate their patronage.
I will try to give the reasons, since I’m a millennial, albeit one that doesn’t hesitate to complain if I get what I think is bad service or a defective product. Most of my peers’ attitude on why complaining makes you (and me) a jerk is that it is mean to do the service-level employee at a social level (“you shouldn’t boss people around, you’re being unfriendly”), and harmful on an economic level because it is the service-level employee on whom the actual negative impact of the complaint is likely to fall.
The latter is true in some cases: I once returned a defective product after it broke and had been rendered useless just outside the return period and later learned that the employee who accepted the return had been fired for violating company policy. But not true in the majority of them. And even when bad things are done to the employee by the business, how is that my fault? I’m supposed to accept bad or even dangerous quality problems because the business holds its employees’ livelihoods hostage in front of me?
It fails all-around. By the numbers:
1. The Complaint is 84-pages of redundant crap, beginning with “by their undersigned attorneys.” Old lawyer tip: that’s obvious when it’s signed.
2. There is no showing of a likelihood of success on the merits unless there is substantial proof the result would have been different. There ain’t.
3. Even easier–it’s a shotgun pleading.
4. A discussion of the errors regarding DP and EP would take a bunch of bytes and would only be educational. I’m not in a mood and don’t have the time to smartenize dopes that don’t bother to make sure they aren’t writing 84 pages of a fantalogue.
As for Internet stuff, come to the Swamp. If access goes down, we just tap into a neighbor. Empty snowbird houses are everywhere.
Change a few words here and there and you could easily be talking about the healthcare industry.
But I’m not because I can talk about what I want to because it’s my blawg.
I should have known that… I’ve been reading this blog long enough to know this….
This happens with my service both at home and at the office. It could be simply a fact of Internet life that can’t be varied no matter who one contracts with.
It could. Should it, if our future is dependent on connectivity? And should it be a constant rather than a significant aberration?
Point of information: My internet hasn’t gone down a single time in the last 5 years.
That’s because you’re special.
True, though I’m not sure what my status as an SJ luminary has to do with the current discussion.
It’s a fact in the US with de facto regional monopolies. Real competition in any regional market would bring almost immediate improvement, which is why the existing companies keep the local legislatures in their pocket and go to court so quickly anytime it appears some competition is starting.
Good luck rolling that rock up the hill over and over again, Pops. What are consumers to do when they have no viable alternative than to be treated like shit? The return on time invested is horrendous.
Running new lines is expensive and a barrier to entry for competition, so we’re at the mercy of established ISPs.
Profitability is the mother of invention.
My job requires me to have internet service in order to earn my hourly rate, so I have figured out a few tricks for preventing failures and for routing around them when they occur. I’m sure you don’t care, but if you did I could tell you all about it.
If you’re sure, why do you offer?
Because I’m pedantic.
Opinions on election fraud appear to be splitting pretty cleanly across party lines, similar to the “Russia” narrative 4 years ago. Republicans are sure that there was rampant fraud that changed the result; Democrats are positive that there was no fraud at all and that the Rs are spewing conspiracy theories. Strangely, there are no stories about Russian hacking. Did the Russians sit this one out?
As a disinterested observer recognizing that politics is just a TV show and finding my life unaffected by the party affiliation of the figurehead who distracts and entertains us as the country is managed by the real rulers for their benefit, it is obvious that there was fraud. There is always election fraud. Kennedy won with stuffed ballots. Gore beat Bush. I’ll spare you the links but both of these are well-documented, and if we go back further in history it gets worse. Election fraud is as american as apple pie. The important question is, was there enough fraud to swing the election, and can it be proved to the point where the result is reversed? There’s no obvious answer to this, despite what partisans on both sides say, but it seems unlikely.
Even to a non-lawyer, Trump’s filing seems weak. He has been bloviating about election fraud for months. It’s surprising that he didn’t hire some good lawyers and get them started working on potential legal theories months ago. I suppose he didn’t actually believe what he was saying.
Thank you for saving me from having to delete your links to utter idiocy in your minor dive down the pointless and insane rabbit hole.
Pedantic Grammar Police.
“… my life unaffected by the party affiliation of the figurehead who distracts and entertains us as the country is managed by the real rulers for their benefit…”
I’m glad your life is unaffected by the party in power.
Being in the mining industry, I can tell you that a lot of projects are getting ready to go into shutdown. Many people are going to be laid off. Democrats have stated more than once they want to shut us down.
So if the party in power doesn’t effect your livelihood, I’m glad for you.
I live in Penang, Malaysia these past 2.5 years. My ISP is TIME. From them I have only Internet service, nothing else. Download speed is an advertised 500 Mbs, though I regularly clock at 550 to 560. Planned service outages are from 10 pm until 6 am about one every other month. Unplanned and short outages or slow download speed events are rare, about once in 4 months. Monthly bill is RM 147, or about USD 35. All around the world, networking equipment costs about the same, the WiFi router in my home is a world price, fiber costs the same. Have no idea why Internet access at much slower speeds and much more frequent outages is so expensive in the US.
The day the Internet died
and they were singing
Bye bye miss American pie…