Internet Black and Blue

Once again I have wasted hours dealing with the erratic performance of the Cincinnati Bell DSL network.  Starting Saturday night the packet loss was so great that launching Explorer was a endless loop with no response.  It takes the "Patience of Job" (as my mother always says) to deal with the first level, second level technical support before the incident gets escalated to the network technicians.  No less than four phone calls, three hours on the phone, a trip to the CBT retail store to swap out of the Westell 6100 modem, and sitting at home waiting for a technician call - all these events create extreme waste in customer time, and vendor time.  This problem was familiar - why won't CBT trust my analysis?

Now this evening, the internet is magically up and running with 4.35 meg download.  Who knows what happened in the black box and dark wire in the ground?  It remains a mystery to the customer. At least my endless boring blogs about the problems provide some audit trail of the challenges of CBT's DSL network.  Now

Historically, I have had two reasons for staying with Cincinnati Bell (in spite of all these difficulties) -(1) I hate Time Warner especially after their response on charging me the early termination fee on my 2 yr Guaranteed Fixed Price Contract and .... (2)  my loyalty to a past client and the friends that still work at Cincinnati Bell.  Oh there is one more reason -  (3) selfishly because I have access to the CBT hotspot from my office.

However these problems are now affecting the family.  With iphones, nomads, Direct TV DVR access, Macbooks, and Susan's desktop - when the internet goes down the household cry for technical support mandates 24 by 7 coverage -  and immediate problem resolution.  Thank goodness I have the Sprint  Wireless Data card backup to appease the outcry.

Which leads me to the point of the blog.  What backup do you use for the internet?  A trip to the library, the office at work, your iphone data plan, hotspots at the internet cafes,  a wireless data card, a friend's house.  The internet is becoming like electricty - when it goes out all productivity stops.

So I am black and blue - from the Internet Black(out) and Blues.