I live in rural Vermont near the "decent-sized town" of Brattleboro (translation: population 10,000) where broadband is fairly widely available. My house is about fifteen minutes away from Brattleboro proper, and is technically in neighboring Halifax, but we're close enough that we have a Brattleboro ZIP code. This confuses a number of organizations--particularly Comcast, who in March suddenly began advertising their high-speed cable and internet services to us. I went on the website, typed in my address, and sure enough "my address" had been shown to be internet-accessible. I even called Comcast support and confirmed that I would be able to order Comcast service for my house. The technician was confident about this, though as I pointed out, he was merely typing my address into the lookup service on his company's website, just as I'd done earlier. I was excited to finally get cable, as previously we'd had the kind of dialup service where sometimes it would be cheaper just to buy the porn from the physical store.
There was only one problem with this: my house doesn't get cable. You can tell when your neighborhood is getting cable, especially out here in the woods: the cable truck comes along the road, and suddenly all the people who've only ever heard of the internet are telling all their friends about it. (In semaphore. Yeah, we're hardcore). There is no cable in my area, plain and simple.
So I wish that during the conversation I'd actually tried to order Comcast--just to see how far in the process I'd get. Would they realize their mistake? Or would I get a technician out here who'd get half-way through the installation before he figured out that there was no cable to connect anything to? It's sad when the FCC makes these assumptions. But when your own cable company makes them, that's downright embarrassing.
Slashdot Mirror
I like having two hands free as well, but Firefox always takes me to hugeteencities.com. It's kind of annoying like that.
I live in rural Vermont near the "decent-sized town" of Brattleboro (translation: population 10,000) where broadband is fairly widely available. My house is about fifteen minutes away from Brattleboro proper, and is technically in neighboring Halifax, but we're close enough that we have a Brattleboro ZIP code. This confuses a number of organizations--particularly Comcast, who in March suddenly began advertising their high-speed cable and internet services to us. I went on the website, typed in my address, and sure enough "my address" had been shown to be internet-accessible. I even called Comcast support and confirmed that I would be able to order Comcast service for my house. The technician was confident about this, though as I pointed out, he was merely typing my address into the lookup service on his company's website, just as I'd done earlier. I was excited to finally get cable, as previously we'd had the kind of dialup service where sometimes it would be cheaper just to buy the porn from the physical store.
There was only one problem with this: my house doesn't get cable. You can tell when your neighborhood is getting cable, especially out here in the woods: the cable truck comes along the road, and suddenly all the people who've only ever heard of the internet are telling all their friends about it. (In semaphore. Yeah, we're hardcore). There is no cable in my area, plain and simple.
So I wish that during the conversation I'd actually tried to order Comcast--just to see how far in the process I'd get. Would they realize their mistake? Or would I get a technician out here who'd get half-way through the installation before he figured out that there was no cable to connect anything to? It's sad when the FCC makes these assumptions. But when your own cable company makes them, that's downright embarrassing.