Jesus, Fuck the Cable Monopoly

[100proof]

Have fun with the parody threads.

Finally got Google Fiber today. Been waiting patiently for five years from the time of announcement that it was coming to our area to hookup. Fiber's great and all but I have no particular allegiance to Alphabet at this point. They're just another shit corpo... but goddamn, the call to cancel with my local cable monopoly was a perfect button on the end of that abusive relationship.

Made me wait on hold and go through three people over the course of an hour. Lied to my face multiple times about the "instability of fiber" and offered me a 60% discount on my current service. Funny how there were never any discounts available when I had no alternatives. Big "C'mon baby... I'll suck yo dick!" vibes.

Fuck Spectrum and fuck state-sponsored monopolies.

 

[Jon]

I wish there was a good alternative for internet in my area. Spectrum only has 1 tier and it's like $90 a month. We've had the cord cut forever here so, no bundle BS.

Jon

 

[city41]

When I did this I just kept calmly saying "no thank you, I'd like to cancel" till finally the lady was outright yelling at me. It was horrific.

AT&T came through our neighborhood and dropped fiber, tearing up everyone's front lawn in the process. But hey, at least fiber. I've tried to sign up for it several times and get an error every time. They then provide a 1-800 number and calling it just says "this number is not in service". Gotta love these POS companies.

 

[NeoSneth]

It sounds like your mistake was telling them you were leaving for a competing service. That triggers all their contingency and rescue dialogues.

I have Spectrum gigabit, but it's $120 a month. No other options whatsoever. Very reliable and fast tho....

 

[Fygee]

Cox is the same out here in Vegas.

We have some fiber out here, but it's limited to certain neighborhoods and has been extremely slow to expand. Hasn't been a real threat to them, and it's not marketed well so most folks either don't know about it, or assume its shitty DSL because the same carrier does both.

Now that they have real competition with T-Mo and Verizon home internet, they're pushing really hard to make it difficult to cancel, and market 5G home internet as "not real internet".

 

[lithy]

For some reason I thought Google had given up on Fiber years ago.

 

[StevenK]

AT&T came through our neighborhood and dropped fiber

Amazingly, not a euphemism

 

[Neo Alec]

Exclusive contracts for localities is holding back progress. That and the shear geographic size of the US. I feel like the tech behind plain old cable internet has advanced leaps and bounds in the US out of utter necessity. Too bad they charge an arm and a leg for top speeds.

 

[100proof]

For some reason I thought Google had given up on Fiber years ago.

They're not expanding in to any more cities but any of the ones they already agreed to service are still getting new construction.

It sounds like your mistake was telling them you were leaving for a competing service. That triggers all their contingency and rescue dialogues.

I have Spectrum gigabit, but it's $120 a month. No other options whatsoever. Very reliable and fast tho....

Yeah, they offered me that for $60/mo. "It's not about the money... it's about sending a message".

 

[sr20det510]

Have fun with the parody threads.

Finally got Google Fiber today. Been waiting patiently for five years from the time of announcement that it was coming to our area to hookup. Fiber's great and all but I have no particular allegiance to Alphabet at this point. They're just another shit corpo... but goddamn, the call to cancel with my local cable monopoly was a perfect button on the end of that abusive relationship.

Made me wait on hold and go through three people over the course of an hour. Lied to my face multiple times about the "instability of fiber" and offered me a 60% discount on my current service. Funny how there were never any discounts available when I had no alternatives. Big "C'mon baby... I'll suck yo dick!" vibes.

Fuck Spectrum and fuck state-sponsored monopolies.

When they put Fios In my area two years I dumped Spectrum. When I called they wouldn't budge on price, so I said fuck it I'm out. They didn't really care and said that I'd have issues with FIOs and would be back.

I got Fios with an included eero router and extenders and haven't looked back since. All my neighbors also switched to FIOS. They offered 3 years, 1 gig speed, router and extenders, and a $300 rebate for 59.99.

A few weeks ago a Spectrum rep was in the neighborhood trying to get people back on Spectrum. Dude admitted they were wrong when they let people walk and lost tons customers. They still couldn't compete with the FIOS price.

 

[SouthtownKid]

lolcable

 

[kernow]

The gooble monopoly

 

[HornheaDD]

I have spectrum and it works fine, off thing is that I will lose connection at like 1am, which is annoying because I'm a night owl. But it's not that bad. It's like they just reboot the modem or something and it's back up about 10 mins later.

Google fiber gas dragged their ass and still hasn't come out in my area. The other options are at&t which is absolute garbage, and whatever thing T-Mobile offers, but I'm not gonna rely on my cel phone company to give me stable innanet.

For the price I get plenty of speed/bandwidth and I haven't hit a cap yet. I download a TON of shit and we (well, the wife) stream Netflix and Amazon.

When spectrum was still "time warner" I booted them hard because they kept throwing new modems at literally any problem. I even had emperical data showing it wasn't the modem, or my router or my PC (shit tons of dropped packets - like TONS).

We had at&t for a bit and I kept running off the TW guys that would knock on my door. But after they became spectrum, the service was waaaaaay better.

Haven't had cable TV in probably 10 years at least. Fuck live TV and fuck commercials.

They've knocked on my door offering sports packages and shit. I hate sports, not a selling factor for me. I'm close to canceling Netflix and Disney. We use HBO Max but is my brother in laws account so I don't pay for it.

 

[wyo]

We have Spectrum and Frontier here. Usually one of them is offering a deal of some sort. This should be nationalized imo, not run by these corps.

 

[GutsDozer]

It's nuts. It's gotten to the point where Streaming has become as bad as cable now as well.

 

[HellioN]

It sounds like your mistake was telling them you were leaving for a competing service. That triggers all their contingency and rescue dialogues.

I have Spectrum gigabit, but it's $120 a month. No other options whatsoever. Very reliable and fast tho....

My parents have spectrum and IMO it's garbage. Random outages (drops tv, net, & phone) for hours at a time. They've taken to basically forming a coalition with other neighbors to call en mass to get them to come out.
AT&T rolled out fiber in the area and I keep trying to convince them to give it a shot, how much worse can it be really?
We live in reasonable proximity to each other IIRC, maybe check with at&t again.

 

[100proof]

It's nuts. It's gotten to the point where Streaming has become as bad as cable now as well.

Streaming is worse than cable at this point. All of their catalogs have been stripmined (since all of the studios fled to their separate little content fiefdoms) and getting even the three most robust ones (Netflix, Disney, Max) costs more than a basic cable subscription.

Not saying that I'd rather go back to the old days of channel surfing, cable monopolies and contract holdouts over how many worthless channels have to be added so that cable companies can have ESPN. As our parents continue to die out, that whole industry is going to crumble into dust.

Ideally, what I'd really want are streaming networks that actually have meat to them. Disney owns like 50% of the history of cinema but Disney Plus is nothing but Star Wars, capeshit and princess movies. Instead of spending $50 million dollars on some shitty Marvel show everyone will forget in six months, put in the fucking work to digitize and convert your old movies to 1080p minimum and have an actual goddamn library. If you're going to charge people absurd amounts of money to access it, provide some fucking value and don't just spit out the same garbage everyone's seen a thousand times.

 

[Neo Alec]

Each time you move you have to figure out whether the DSL provider or cable is better in tbat neighborhood. Usually one is obviously better, while the other suffers from more dropouts and lower speeds.

 

[Cousin_Itt]

I got spectrum just because it was the only thing available in my area 5 years ago. There were two tiers at the time. 100mb and 300mb DL. I bought the more expensive since I had house mates who also were gamers. I also got that spectrum mobile just because $30 basic unlimited plan since I already have internet through them. 3rd of the cost of what I was paying for ATT. Benefit of both is that at least Taxes and Fees are included in the price.

Flash foward to now. They keep bumping up the internet cost. Internet for my tier is $100. They bumped me up to 500mb. since base tier is now 300mb. I've added my parents to my cell line since they were getting screwed by Verizon. So it's $90 for 3 lines. the mobile is funny since it's an MVNO, it always marks my location on web pages as somewhere like Dallas or Chicago. I need to downgrade my internet to base tier, but that's still $85 per month. And I have to go to their office an hour since they closed their local office. They won't let me downgrade over the phone.

Clearwave Fiber just moved into my area. The "starter rate" is basically a 1/3 discount for the first year and you still need to pay taxes and fees. Like for Like speed, it's about the same cost though UPloads were be dramatically improved. The major downside is that I would need to find a new Mobile carrier since the Spectrum discount wouldn't apply if I got rid of their internet.

I'm probably just going to keep Spectrum for now. I haven't really had any major complaints with them as far as ISPs is concerned, and They have by far not been the worst cable company I've dealt with by a long shot. I'm looking at you MediaCom in southern Illinois, and COX in southern California.

 

[Lagduf]

This should be nationalized imo, not run by these corps.

Based.

 

[Fygee]

We have Spectrum and Frontier here. Usually one of them is offering a deal of some sort. This should be nationalized imo, not run by these corps.

Pick your poison. Overpriced private internet, or state run internet that's bound to not be as good and subject to additional restrictions and monitoring imposed by the state?

Sure as hell don't want nationalized internet like Russia or China have.

 

[wataru330]

Bring back Ma Bell; her kids are misbehaving.