Bats should flap. Internet should not.

[sistawendy]

Comcast Xfinity was in my neighborhood a few weeks ago to "optimize" some service, they said. Mine went from bad to worse: during video calls for work, my connection would be up for about five seconds and then down for five, alternating like that for several minutes. This rendered work-related discussions unintelligible to me, and that's not acceptable.

I didn't even call Comcast Xfinity. We're talking about the company that changed its name rather than make their service not suck. What did I do? I switched to fiber internet as of yesterday. Key takeaways:

1. Pages now load way faster. Noice!
2. The video calls are more stable after the first couple of minutes, but...
3. ...the first couple of minutes are glitchy. During such times ping 8.8.8.8 tells me there's no route, so I'm guessing it's a cold cache issue somewhere.
4. The installer wouldn't put the new gear in my bedroom closet like the old gear had been; he said there wasn't enough room. That means there's no signal in the cables in my walls. If I want to use a hard-wired connection, as I do for work, I have to string the cable over the edge of the loft and behind the bookshelves. Ah well, that makes it the third piece of cable hanging from the loft.

Comcast Xfinity doesn't want to let you cancel your service. You can't do it through the web site, and the phone tree didn't pay attention to my key presses. Luckily for me, there's an Xfinity store a short bus ride away. I went there with their modem, which they scanned to identify my account.

They told me that the reason my service had been so bad was that somebody had given me the wrong modem! Over two years ago! I remember several upsell emails from Comcast Xfinity, but at no point did any message say, "Switch modems or your service will be all broke." That might have gotten my attention. Sheesh.