For the past couple weeks, Comcast has been badgering me to sign up for a new modem, which will supposedly give me faster speed. I finally did that, and it’s been sitting around the apartment in the shipping box for a week or so.
Well. I opened it up today. It turned out to be this huge 8x9x2” box that provides wireless. Which is not a feature I need, given that I have a perfectly good pair of AirPorts sitting around the house. Especially given that I believe this modem is intended to broadcast a second network for anyone else who’s a Comcast subscriber to use. The spectrum is cluttered enough in this apartment, I don’t need to introduce two new networks I won’t use into the mix.
And I could have sent the thing back, or tried to find out how to disable its wireless capacities, or whatever. But I’d also been noticing my Comcast bill creeping higher and higher; lately, it’s been $90-150 per month, and I keep getting these CenturyLink fliers offering me $20/mo if I bundle phone with it, and… you know, if I’m going to hassle with swapping modems, why not just say goodbye to Comcast.
The best offer Comcast could give me was going down to $40/mo for 20mbps (probably actually more like 15 given what I get now), which just wasn’t worth it. So I said goodbye. I was braced for it to be a very long and painful process, but it only took about ten minutes from entering the hold dungeon to having my service turned off this weekend.
Goodbye, $100 per month for mediocre internet. I won’t miss you. (I mean really, Comcast has a 105mbps “extreme” net for that price. Geeze.)
And now I’m signed up for 12mbps at $30/mo from Centurylink. Which may be a little slower but it’s also not, you know, a hundred fucking dollars a month, geeze, fuck you Comcast. This frog’s done being boiled for a while.
I fucking hate the state of internet services in this country.
Comcast’s been abysmal about pushing their modem upgrades lately; I actually upgraded my modem two years ago (to one I purchased outright, and which is still on their recommended list) but they “forgot” to update my information and recently have been badgering me to upgrade to a leased, bullshit, xfinitywifi-enabled modem. (Which also means that you’ll probably get leeched off of A LOT, slowing you down even further.)
If I could get 12Mbps CenturyLink where I am, I’d probably switch, but I’m lost in the 6Mbps-max doldrums right now.
It’s a shame Gigabit Seattle is stalled again.