I wish I could say that I hate Charter Communications and that they were the worst ISP in the world. But I’m afraid I may have already said that about Cox and AFN. Although I do have to say that Cox didn’t seem to have anywhere near the issues of Charter. My service goes down on average of at least 2 – 3 times per month. And I’m not talking about 10 or 20 minutes, I’m talking hours, often all night.
I think the most annoying part of the service going down is that I’m one of the first customers to notice it. And each time I naively call them up to see what the issue is. And then of course I get to go through the whole idiotic process to prove to them the problem is not on my end. “Unplug and reset the modem†, “Are you sure your WiFi is working?†, “Ping this address†.
I actually called them once when my Internet went down, but I had to head out to an appointment in the next 10 minutes. I waited on hold for about 3 minutes when the always helpful rep came on the line. I let him know it was down and I was running out the door, but that didn’t stop him from going through the whole insane process. And I just love when they have you wait on the line while they check things out there. Then when I told him I had to take off, he actually says this; “sir, you should have planned more than 10 minutes to deal with this issue.†Can you believe that shit? Like I should schedule my day around their screw ups.
But enough ranting, here is my question: I’m relocating this month to a new place, and trying to avoid this problem when I get there. So I stumbled across the idea of a dual wan router. This is a router where you can plug two separate connections (like DSL and Cable) into one router. This not only gives you redundancy, but also combines the pipe to give you a lot more bandwidth to work with. I was a little nervous about this at first, but I got some reassurance from a friend at a vendor of USWeb.
The price would be $50 a month for a premium connection from a cable company, and another $40 per month for DSL. This will give me a combined pipe of 6.5 mbps download, and 3mbps upload (which in case you don’t know, is super fast), and it should give me an uptime of 99.9999%. Since I currently pay Charter $180 per month for a premium business connection with what appears to be 90% uptime, and no where near that bandwidth, this is a tremendous deal.
Sorry I have taken the long path to my question here, so if you’re still reading here it is: Why don’t the cable and DSL companies do this for us? Why not sell us this package right out of the gate? Or better yet, why not do this downstream from us, so we don’t ever see down time. If Charter’s system fails, why not borrow from Qwest, and vice versa? I’m sure there would need to be agreements about how much they could lean on each others systems without paying a fee or something, but it still seems like it would make sense. The only reason I can see is that they like poaching each others customers when they can, so they rather not help a competitor, even if it’s better for their own customer service. A little thought to the customers would be worth it’s weight in gold
Anyway, I’ll post here once I run my new system for a month and let anyone interested know how the dual wan system worked for me.
p.s. This was written while my Internet was down.
[tags]charter, qwest, dsl, wifi, isp, dual wan[/tags]
