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February 09, 2007
MegaInestable
I love my cable Internet access, and my provider, MegaCable. Maybe I should say that I used to love them, anyway. After about six months of our having service with them, they doubled all their customers' speeds for no extra cost. Paying for 6 months in advance, they give me an extra month for free. But starting about three weeks ago, we started having problems with our service. So did our neighbors across the hall. The Internet access would go out completely for hours. For our neighbors, who have digital cable, their cable would go out too.
We called to get them to come fix it, or rather, I asked Charles to do this for me. (I'm just not nearly good enough to go through a tech support issue over the phone in Spanish yet.) They told us that they were aware of the problem; they could tell from their monitoring software that we'd been dropped some 31 thousand times (in what period of time, I don't know) and that indicates a definite problem. They sent a guy out to check on it, and he said that yes, the signal was low, so he fixed it. Then later that night, it went out again, for the entire night. They have now sent a guy out five different times, and each time, they admit that the signal is low, and they tweak something to fix it, only to have it go out again around 7 pm.
A supervisor told Alberto last night he would finally send out a "night crew," which is usually only reserved for emergencies; they don't have normal night crews working standard problem reports, so if your stuff goes out after 7 pm, you are stuck with it not working until 9 am the following day (at least...usually, they send someone out a day after the business day on which you call them). He was supposed to talk to Alberto again tonight, but I have not since spoken to Alberto to find out if there is any news about that. However, he told Alberto yesterday that they had done extensive testing and there is no problem with their equipment. They suspect maybe it's some external problem, like interference. That does seem possible, since it always seems to go out around 7 pm, fails more or less only at night, seeming to work pretty consistently during the daytime.
Supposedly whatever it is, it's causing problems for the entire neighborhood. The guy that came out yesterday (that would be the fifth guy) said that there are six people consistently complaining of this problem in our area.
I know that's not all that interesting to read about, and a problem like that could happen anywhere, not just Mexico. I'm not really writing to shed any light on how that stuff works here. Yet because it is impacting my ability to get new entries up, approve comments, do research and answer email, I thought I'd let you all know that we've got ongoing problems with our access and ask for your understanding and patience.
Posted by crispy at February 9, 2007 09:19 PM