Thursday, April 14, 2005

"We are experiencing service interruptions in the following areas:"

That's the way the message started during the last two nights when I called Comcast to see why my internet connection quit working all of a sudden. On Tuesday night, the area turned out to be all of Middle Tennessee. But nothing was as funny/annoying as last night when I called. The outage was in "All of Middle Tennessee; Alabama; Mississippi; Paducah, KY (?); and Metropolis, IL (!?!)."

Maybe I've grown a little impatient over the past several years, but it's really frustrating when you're like me and you need to obsessively check your email every few minutes if you are within reach of a computer. The me of ten years ago would be kicking my ass right now if it knew how much I was complaining about not being able to connect to the internet. But seriously though, I was trying to finish an online class I was taking and following up on some job leads. Am I wrong in expecting to get uninterrupted service?

3 comments:

Timmie Smith said...

Unfortunately, the only thing you can expect uninterrupted service from is a land-line telephone. That is because there are federal regulations that dictate the acceptable amount of downtime a telephone switch can have, and for the most central components in the network it is something like 5 minutes over 20 years. The regulations come with huge fines, so the telephone companies keep their stuff working.

The cable companies have no such regulations to control them. If you really need to get your fix, find the last AOL cd that came in the mail and sign up for the free month. Unless you only have your cellphone, in which case I think you're just out of luck.

Wes Raine said...

Wow! What a thorough and concise comment. It kind of sucks though. When will there be regulations on the internet? Probably not until it's been around for as long as the telephone.

Timmie Smith said...

Unfortunately, I think it will be even longer than that. Folks are going to have a hard time convincing Congress that their ability to watch TBS 24/7 can mean the difference between life and death. Telephones are regulated so heavily because of the need to call for help in case of emergency. If it wasn't for 911 your telephone service would probably be as bad as your cable service.