Comment It's a Cable Company committed to low standards (Score 2) 431
I don't know how it is in the US, at least in regards to @Home, but in Canada, cable companies are buying Internet services from @Home just as local ISPs (which are more common then the big guys in Canada) buy it from the big telcos.
Why does this matter? Because the guys providing support aren't @Home representatives, they're the local cable company techies. Who fixes your area when problems go wrong? The local cable company not anybody from @Home. This means the responsibly for the poor customer support and network downtimes falls on the cable companies, not @home. @Home doesn't care about you (and I am an @Home customer, btw), they sell to the cable companies and I think we all know that the cable companies don't care about you and never have.
It's not right, but it was never right. Everyone accepted it with television, but when cable companies started providing Internet services, we expected a higher standard that cable companies won't and never have provided.
When my local ISP provided dialup my Internet service it always worked and no busy signals. Then I changed to The Wave(tm) from Cogeco cable services and I had continual problems getting my email two months after I started with them, but I was already hooked on the speed. When it worked, it worked great; when it didn't, it really sucked. Forget technical support, they didn't even know which areas were down for even scheduled maintenance.
Then they bought into the @Home and became Cogeco@Home. The service didn't get better thought the hype certainly did of all the new things we'd get with @Home, none of which I gave a rat's ass about. I just wanted a stable connection which is what I finally seem to have after about 2.5 years of having the service.