“excellent customer service” is a really weird to state “monopolistic practices”
It’s a good way to say, “customer service that blocks the exit,” though!
Hahahahahaha.
Fuck. It’s so fake it makes me feel sick, I hate large corporations, especially ones with monopolies. It’s disgusting.
Stares in local duopoly
I have spectrum or 500kbs DSL. That’s it. That’s such a a blatant lie anyone that has Internet will confirm.
I work for an ISP, we have 10 second to 3 minutes hold times before you’re speaking to a real rep, we have had downtime 5 times since I started working for them 4 years ago for maintenance (upgrading hardware to support larger bandwidth in different areas), we sell 1Gbps symmetrical speeds with unlimited data for $50/mo, we have 50k customers (in a specific area) and 5 customer service reps. Customer service quality is definitely important, but providing a service with minimal issues and great prices, that’s why the ISP I work for can get away with such a minimum amount of representatives and continue to get a 4.7 star rating on Google as an ISP.
It’s fun working for a company like this because you get to see how 50k customers paying for 1Gbps only use 70-85Gbps at any given time on average lol, people think they need a lot of bandwidth when in reality they just need a better router for their local network’s bandwidth. WiFi hasn’t been a great tech so far honestly, Wi-Fi 6 made a lot of improvements, maybe with WiFi7/8 that changes though. Big name consumer routers like Netgear have been dropping the ball with quality for years, but they still rake in the cash because at one point they made really great hardware.
I’ve learned a lot about networking because of this job, and it’s given me a really great perspective of how awful Comcast/Xfinity/spectrum and CenturyLink/QuantumFiber really are, how much they try to get in the pockets of the people who make the decisions for infrastructure in our cities, there were so many hate ads against the ISP I work for during an election season all paid for by Comcast and CenturyLink.
Anyways, customer service is great, but quality of service is much more important. Having both is a win all around.
In Algeria no one switches because there’s only one ISP.
shoutout to Andrews & Arnold, best ISP in the uk. I called to stop using them because I was leaving the country forever and they were like “good, what else do you want?” MFs gave zero shits and gave great high speed service.
We have 1 choice or nothing. If my ham sandwich suddenly provided bandwidth, id drop my isp in a heartbeat
This is stupid, but I thought I’d opened the discussion for this post, and trying to make sense of your comment within that context was interesting.
Not in NYC. Spectrum is my only option and they are flaky as hell
if you want to listen to 35 minutes of annoying music, press 1. If you want to get insulted personally by an operator stay on the line
Every 5 minutes, at max volume:
YOUR CALL IS IMPORTANT TO US. ALL AVAILABLE OPERATORS ARE HELPING OTHER CUSTOMERS. PLEASE STAY ON THE LINE.
2 minutes later:
DID YOU KNOW <COMPANY> IS WORKING TO SAVE CUSTOMERS LIKE YOU MONEY? UPGRADE YOUR PLAN TO ULTIMATE TODAY AND SAVE! YOU CAN ADD BASIC CABLE TO YOUR INTERNET PLAN FOR FREE FOR 3 MONTHS. MAKE ANY SOUND AT ALL TO LEAVE THE SUPPORT QUEUE AND SPEAK WITH A NEW ACCOUNT SPECIALIST RIGHT AWAY.
returns to playing compressed elevator music through an old can
All infrastructure should be owned by the government
Or at least community cooperatives. Having no voice or say in how your fixed infrastructure is operated is asking to be exploited
The only reason I take their customer service up my ass is because it always sucks no matter what ISP I use.
The only reason I do it is because I have no other choice. For me it’s either suffering with Comcast or using extremely shitty DSL (which is too slow for me to do my job properly). I live in a suburban area, but for some reason, my neighborhood has only one high speed option. And I know there are plenty of other people all over the country in the same predicament.
I live where there’s 1 isp and 10 mobile/satellite providers
ISPs are generally all equally as bad (except for Spectrum. They’re probably the worst.). I stay with my ISP because they’ve never once complained about any of the torrenting I’ve done.
And where are they based?
Not to shill, but this is the primary reason why I’ve stayed with FIOS for the past few years. That and the fact that there are no contracts, it’s just a flat fee, forever. No promotion period or anything, either.
Unfortunately the next administration will likely agree with the ISPs on this. To an extent T-Mobile and Verizon 5G home internet has genuinely shaken up the industry. As long as low latency isn’t a requirement of yours they’re quite good. For me they offer higher upload speeds than my local ISP monopoly with similar download speeds.
