The discussion here is fascinating, especially that so many respondents seem to be happy with not-so-good reliability of the service they receive. Is something wrong to ask for a better quality? It not necessary must be more expensive and if nobody does anything nothing is going to change. I would expect more calls for action. Fascinating.
The answer is in TFA IMHO. The phone service has been categorized as important and service providers have been obligated to report service outages longer than two minutes. All other thinks are a consequence of this. I remember that telecom equipment manufactures competed on the reliability of their wares bragging about the total number of minutes the phone service was out in the whole US in a year. And I mean minutes. Thus the manufacturers strived to offer extremely reliable equipment because the service providers made their purchase decisions based on it. I think FCC is not going to require the TV cable industry to report outages for a practical reason, and I doubt congress will make cable an important service. As to cell service the medium itself is not reliable and you could be without service even if there is no outage. I am not sure but I bet the cell providers report their outages to FCC.
It does not mean that I do not care for the reliability of other services. I do.
I used to have ADSL service from Verizon and it was actually good and I was happy. In the same place I tried Comcast and its service was absolutely horrible. But I have moved and the DSL provider here is not good at all. The service is reliable but they throttle the throughput based on TOD.
Slashdot Mirror
The discussion here is fascinating, especially that so many respondents seem to be happy with not-so-good reliability of the service they receive. Is something wrong to ask for a better quality? It not necessary must be more expensive and if nobody does anything nothing is going to change. I would expect more calls for action. Fascinating.
The answer is in TFA IMHO. The phone service has been categorized as important and service providers have been obligated to report service outages longer than two minutes. All other thinks are a consequence of this. I remember that telecom equipment manufactures competed on the reliability of their wares bragging about the total number of minutes the phone service was out in the whole US in a year. And I mean minutes. Thus the manufacturers strived to offer extremely reliable equipment because the service providers made their purchase decisions based on it. I think FCC is not going to require the TV cable industry to report outages for a practical reason, and I doubt congress will make cable an important service. As to cell service the medium itself is not reliable and you could be without service even if there is no outage. I am not sure but I bet the cell providers report their outages to FCC. It does not mean that I do not care for the reliability of other services. I do. I used to have ADSL service from Verizon and it was actually good and I was happy. In the same place I tried Comcast and its service was absolutely horrible. But I have moved and the DSL provider here is not good at all. The service is reliable but they throttle the throughput based on TOD.
Yes, I am disappointed as well.