State0 Blog

I have not posted in a while because I have been offline while moving into our new house. We used to live in the westlake area. That area only gets internet from Time Warner. When I first moved in, I thought, “How is this possible?” I am living near every dellionaire in Austin and I only get served by Time Warner, the most hated of all internet providers!? However, I swallowed my pride and had them come set up our internet.

The service was seemingly good while I lived in that house, probably because I had low expectations. However, it is quitting TimeWarner that is the horrific part. They make getting in very easy and getting out very hard. I now have to take my router to Breaker and Mopac during the working day to get them to stop billing me for bits they are not transferring to a house I do not live in. Until then, I am paying $45/month instead of the original $30 because of the bait-and-switch billing programs.

Needless to say, I was excited about getting new service in my new house in Terrytown. That was until I started calling folks like Grande, AT&T, and Comcast only to find that none of them serve my area. In the end, I went with EarthLink, which is just another name for TimeWarner. Screwed again. When the Time Warner guy showed up to hook my “EarthLink” modem up. I asked him to take in the TimeWarner modem back for me, but obviously, that would have been too similar to customer service to be an option.

All this to say that, in my opinion, everything that is good about the internet is bad about internet service providers. But how can this be? How can a city like Austin continue to thrive as a tech mecca if we do not even have decent internet services? I am in pain. Why is someone not stepping up to make money off of my pain? I am certain this is happening on a national level. Someone needs to innovate us out of this.