Roadrunner is far from perfect, but this area is very lucky on the
broadband front compared to Maryland, where Comcast dominates cable and
DSL is not widely available.
When @home was Comcast's (only) cable Internet connection provider, DNS,
email, and member page servers constantly went down -- and @home would
*not* provide credit/refunds for time offline.
Service call wait time ranged between 5 and 15 days.
Now that @home has (deservedly) gone broke, Comcast has raised prices
and is launching a program to detect people running connection-sharing
devices and charge them extra for each connected computer. Bandwidth is
capped; 128K upload max. Ports blocked. 384K download cap, but you
hardly ever got that speed anyway.
And you now wait a mimimum of 45 minutes on hold for phone support, up
from @home's minimum 30 minutes.
Not visible to the public but evil: they cut pay to installer &
troubleshooter techs -- independent contractors -- by 20% without
notice. Tim, my oldest stepdaughter's off-and-on boyfriend, is one of
their subcontractors. He's talking about moving ot W. Palm, where he has
family, and going with AOLTW, because he says they treat their service
people better than Comcast.
And a choice, as in Earthlink? Ha! Comcast has no such plans. Of course,
AOLTW is only doing it because it was an FTC merger condition, but at
least it exists here.
And in MD, where the telco infrastructure is much older than here, DSL
is not widely available.
Count your broadband blessing, Tampa Bay people!
- Robin
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