Beware @Home high speed cable service
Dec 07 '00
Here's the good, the bad, and the ugly on @Home's high speed cable modem service. This is essentially a good service w. terrible customer service and serious maintenance & quality control problems. The price seems reasonable at around $40/mo.
Compared to plain modem service, speed on @Home is remarkable, though speed does seriously degrade in my neighborhood in the evenings. I've also noticed that speed in general has degraded fr. about 8-12 mos. ago when I first subscribed. When you first get @Home, it feels like a whole new world of speed & internet technology opens up to you.
But then you start using it & after a while, disappointment strikes. The BIGGEST problem & a serious one for me, is that the server goes down regularly fr. 15 mins. to 3 days. This means that you may be able to read incoming e mail msgs. but you can send no outgoing msgs. Sometimes you can neither receive nor send msgs. during an outage.
Forget about trying to call @Home's customer service. Waits are tremendous; reps are either stupid or disingenuous in discussions of the service. They never know whether service is down in yr. area. If they do know that it's down, they NEVER, NEVER can tell you anything about when it will be restored. And the ABSOLUTE WORST aspect of this service is that once service is restored most of yr. msgs. which originated during the outage will be sent or received. MOST, but not ALL. SO you'll never know whether that one important msg. was received by yr. correspondent. You'll never know for sure whether you received an imp. msg. that someone tried to send to you.
An alternative is to have a conventional free email ISP. The problem w. this option is that you have to install the new ISP, make sure yr. connections are set up correctly, figure out how to use it & access it. Then you have a 2nd ISP, which does complicate yr. life. You generally only need to use it to send msgs. when @Home is down.
I'm considering trying DSL for a new phone line I'm installing. Anyone know of good DSL service providers in Seattle?
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Epinions.com ID:
richards1052
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