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Comcast's Incompetence, Lack of Broadband May Force Developer To Sell Home
BUL2294 writes Consumerist has an article about a homeowner in Kitsap County, Washington who is unable to get broadband service. Due to inaccurate broadband availability websites, Comcast's corporate incompetence, CenturyLink's refusal to add new customers in his area, and Washington state's restrictions on municipal broadband, the owner may be left with no option but to sell his house 2 months after he bought it, since he works from home as a software developer. To add insult to injury, BroadbandMaps.gov says he has 10 broadband options in his zip code, some of which are not applicable to his address, have exorbitant costs (e.g. wireless), or are for municipal providers that are prevented from doing business with him by state law. Yet, Comcast insists in filings that "the broadband marketplace is more competitive than ever." As someone who had Comcast call to cancel on the day of my closing (two days before my scheduled install) because they didn't offer service to my house after all, I can sympathize.
I am sure the phone company can pull a T1 out so if it is really that important to his livelihood why not bite the bullet? Dumping a home 2 months after buying would likely cost more.
Same thing happened to me. Comcast said "oh sure we service that address."
When I went for Comcast Residential they quoted me $4k to build out. So I called Comcast Business and put in a request for 100 MBit, signed a 3 year contract and everything as long as they footed the bill for the install.
They installed it to the house and then realized they only had DOCSIS 2.0 in the area and couldn't actually fulfill the terms of their contract so Comcast Business canceled on me.
Then I called Comcast Home again, they sent an installer out and I'm now paying $39.99/month for 25/3. It did kind of feel good to 'screw' Comcast just a bit. They're so large and incompetent the left hand doesn't know what the right is doing.
Naw it wouldnt most of the providers arent expanding their networks much even if they have the option to in a area ESPICIALLY in poor and rural areas.
I have a friend that lives 10 miles from downtown Dallas and .5 mile from the fiber trunk that runs south from Dallas and NONE of the providers will run any kind of broadband to that area because it is poorer where they all run to the rich developments in the north part of town.
I live in a fairly rural place, but still work from home for a large tech company. When I built my house, the ONLY internet available was through a local WISP. I was paying ~$160 / month for 3 Mbps service. It was completely unreliable (the WISP actually didn't employ a network technician, just occasionally contracted one out). It wasn't horrible though when it worked, and I was able to do my job, so I lived with it. After 7 years I had totaled that I had spent over $13,000 on 3 Mbps internet. I figured it was time to do something about it.
What I did was contact a local business owner in town. He happened to own a 250 foot tower next to his small business (not necessary, a tall building will probably work in most cases). In exchange for providing him free internet in his building he allowed me to purchase a business connection and run a line up 100 ft up his tower. I put up a single 120 degree 5Ghz sector. I didn't really need to go that high just for me though as I had line of sight and very few trees.
All my neighbors needed internet though and were paying outrageous rates too. Putting up the sector allowed me to connect them as well. Some of them are 8+ miles from the tower. They pay me $20/month (plus the cost of their QRT5) and pretty much pay for my new line completely now. Proper QOS rules ensures no one hogs it all but still allows any of them to utilize the line to its max if no one else is. In the last 8 months since installing it, not a single connection problem even though power went out in town for a few hours. Everything is on battery backup.
I now plan on doubling my bandwidth and moving the sector another 50 feet up the tower to reach a few more of my neighbors. Another option I have thought about is going 200 ft up the tower, and hitting the datacenter 50 miles away that I currently have a rack with 1 Gbps internet. The datacenter owns a 10 story building next store, and would allow me to put a P2P on top of it. Having even 100 Mbps connection at the house would be a dream come true at this point.
Tower side - RF Elements Sector MIMO 5-120 paired with a Mikrotik RB912UAG-5HPnD (and case)
House side - Mikrotik QRT5
I was expecting this to be a homeowner fail, but:
Q: Why Didn’t you check this before you moved? A: Oh, but I did. Having broadband of some kind was an absolute requirement for our new home. Before we even made an offer, I placed two separate phone calls; one to Comcast Business, and one to Xfinity. Both sales agents told me that service was available at the address. The Comcast Business agent even told me that a previous resident had already had service. So I believed them.
Another option would be to write availability of high speed internet into the purchase contract for the house - make it a condition of purchase. I took this approach to ensure I wouldn't find out after closing that my house could not get high speed Internet. My offer and contract basically said that I would buy the house if I could successfully have high speed internet installed in advance of the purchase at my cost. The seller accepted the contract, I paid the ISP (in this case DSL from the telephone company) to install the service, the ISP installed the service, and then we closed the house sale. My realtor didn't like it because it was an "unusual" offer, but I said it was a contract and I could put any conditions in it I wanted - the seller just had to agree (and did).