Squirrels and nuts

Comcast got our cable modem back online this morning. It had strangely gone down without warning sometime Saturday, so Trish has been without email and internet, and I had been without... well, lots of stuff.

After testing everything inside the house, the tech worked his way to the back yard and found chew marks on one of the connectors. He replaced it, and back inside everything started working like clockwork. He left us a bag of nuts and berries to keep the squirrels from getting hungry, and said he'd see us again in a few years when they chew through it again.

But seriously, the tech didn't seem to have all his diagnostic ducks in a row. He knew enough about line levels and all, but I was a bit surprised when, after determining that we didn't have any kind of a connection, he typed "www.yahoo.com" into a browser just to make sure.

Aside from that, I was really pleased with how Comcast handled the situation. I've been on the phone with them a lot in the last couple of weeks, for various reasons. The hold times have been under two minutes, if there was a hold time at all, and the person on the other end had both the knowledge and information to answer all my questions. Also, I was especially pleased at how they shifted gears after I demonstrated I knew what I was talking about. No dumbed-down script, no requests to repeat what I had already done, or checking the simple stuff ("is there a link light on both ends of the cable?"). It's very encouraging that a big company like Comcast serving primarily the home market has technicians with the sophistication and professionalism to deal with users like me.

By way of comparison, my brief experiment with Verizon DSL was not positive. The hold times weren't bad (I called off-peak, of course), but the person on the other end didn't seem to know his OS from a hole in the ground. I got rather frustrated when, after the third time on hold, he told me I had to run a Windows application on my Unix firewall in order to complete the connection to DSL. I finally convinced him to give me the login and password that application was to provide me. Later, I spoke to a Level 2 Tech who said the login and password didn't even apply to my type of connection.

In the end, it wasn't the customer support that turned me off, there just weren't enough good reasons to switch. Both Comcast and Verizon say in their Terms of Service that you may not run a server, but over the phone, both will tell you that they don't really intend to enforce that rule unless you abuse the service. (Running a spam server, a very busy website, commerce, that sort of thing.) While I'm becoming more comfortable with the idea of running a small server for personal use over the service (maybe the TooMuchBlue gallery?), I don't want to flout the rules either. Verizon DSL's ads suggested that servers were fair game, but what Marketing giveth, Legal takes away.

Verizon also said they could deliver speeds over DSL nearly as fast as cable, for a lower price. Turns out, I could have paid a little over half as much for a little under half as fast a connection. As it is, there are days I'm tempted to drop another $10/month for Comcasts extra-speed option. (My current connection is 6000/384, the speed boost would give me 8000/768).

So all that to say, I'm very happy with Comcast, and barring any changes, I'll probably keep them for quite a while. Maybe if Verizon delivers on the fiber-to-the-house option...