A quick heads up regarding Saturday morning and (hopefully not) later should Picayune go offline when you’re dropping by or your RSS Feeder shows a disconnect/can’t subscribe icon.
I was planning on wasting several hours on the phone with AT&T to get our plan amended. It was a 2011 project anyway. Then this rep came to the door while I was home sick to get it all cleared up. Why AT&T can’t do this at their more convenient, helpful physical stores blows my mind. So he explained how AT&T had upgraded the lines in my neighborhood to fibre optic, blah blah. I asked him to reschedule because I was really sick (it was Monday, the day I was sent home and I was in the middle of a blistering, painful fever). No dice. I endured his pitch. Once I got a commitment to several key things, I agreed to make the change:
- No more telephone line. The telcos will just have to live with the fact that nobody personally needs this service despite the five nines claim. For us, it’s a magnet for people hitting us up for money between 5-9 PM every day. We disconnect any phone going into the line months ago.
- I will not lose my five Class A static IPs. Back in 2001 when the house was nearing completion I spoke to SWBT (AT&T’s predecessor here) to get DSL. Originally I wanted two static IPs but got five because they only offered one or five. So I made the best of it: the servers (old and current) use two, the alarm clock another and our wireless solution with the last.
- We will get elevated to 12 Mbps down/1.5 Mbps up speed. Currently we’re at 1.5 or 3 Mbps down (I can’t remember which)/384 or 768 Kbps up (again, don’t know). Hmmm. Better speed for less money (the bill should drop from $84/month to $45), let’s see if AT&T proves this isn’t too good to be true. The downstream part improving will be great yet the upstream will be even more impressive. Maybe Helen and Jose can finally hear KMAG without serious bandwidth issues.
- We can ditch the U-Verse TV part in a month without penalty. I told him clearly we have Netflix, we have no use for cable television. Comcast and Time Warner hate it since $11/month to watch Netflix’s modest library beats the crap out of their $60+ opportunity to view commercials. My biggest complaint with Dish. I fear the Cable-Telco Cartel will start turning the screws to kill Netflix though. They hate it when an outside competitor beats them at their own rigged free-market game.
Wish me luck. In many ways, I’m the installation tech’s worst nightmare. A customer who actually knows how the “Internet works” and can tell when he’s being lied to. Personally, I’m cautiously optimistic on finally getting performance closer to what we Americans were promised back in the Aughts. Maybe next decade we’ll catch up to where South Korea is today.