I don’t live in a terribly unpopulated area. It is a mix of being a suburb but stretches into rural. People think we are off the beaten path but a major route goes right through our little town and there are more humans than cows. Our options for internet access are limited. Some people can’t even have wired connections. They pay for those devices from their cellular network that provide wireless access. I couldn’t live that count-the-used-gigs life. They reach out to the big names and ask what it would take for them to extend to their area but they don’t have pockets $10,000+ deep.
Begrudgingly, we use Time Warner Cable, or apparently Spectrum now. At every bump in the road their solution was to uprgrade our package. We’ve used their devices, tried our own devices (modems and routers) and yet it hasn’t made a difference in their service. It’s incredibly mediocre. The internet connectivity isn’t continuous. How do you lose connection when you’re hard wired with an HDMI cable? When the internet is considered a utility, it makes me wonder how people would react if other utility services functioned as poorly as my service from TWC/Spectrum.
What if you were sitting in your house and it was normal for you to experience a blackout? What if you went to take a shower but your water wasn’t running? What if it was the dead of winter and your heat wouldn’t turn on?
When you are trying to go back to school by taking online courses that fit around your schedule, it’s important that a utility, a service that you PAY FOR, that it works. It’s important that you aren’t paying for nothing. Even when the internet works it fades in and out, that is not what you pay for. Streaming speeds, and download time aside, its main purpose is to provide access and they cannot even do that.
So we pay for the higher packages, it fixes the problem for a while. Shortly after that, the problem always returns and we are left paying higher rates. All I can do is challenge the company and hope that they are actually concerned with customer satisfaction and not just their bottom line, but I’m not holding my breath.
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