After a surprisingly long stretch of reliable wi-fi, I've run into trouble with it the past couple nights -- timing out, slow loads, "Internet not connected," shit like that. It's really frustrating to go online with a ten-year-old computer with a bad processor; the last thing I need is the connection to be faulty as well. But here we are.
Mother last night said that it's been totally bad all day Thursday, and in the past both of my parents have complained about spotty wi-fi. I haven't been in the house all day so I can't vouch for that contention with my own experience. Plus, my parents bitch about the Internet a lot, so much so that I have tuned that out. But with this latest annoyance, it's becoming more and more apparent that something has to change.
I had been resistant to switching Internet providers. Right now we have it through our phone company, and although I wouldn't consider it to have been 100% reliable, I have thought it enough for all my needs, so much so that I signed up for a five-year price lock-in. I did that when it was decided that I needed to "grow up" and take care of more of the house. Responsibility to Internet access fell to me; I decided that we were going through the phone company instead of some faster but much more expensive access through, say Comcast, and since I was the one paying, I get to decide.
That was fine for my parents at first. But Father has gotten increasingly irritated over its slowness and dropping. Lately he's gotten to switching modems, and that has fucked me up because the modems have different passwords, and the old modem he switched to has a password I can't recall. Luckily for me, all the devices I use have saved the old passwords, but I don't know about my folks. Meanwhile, Mother has decided she wants to spend the rest of her life looking at Chinese videos off of the Internet and from the gifts my brother gives her, including Apple TV a couple years ago. With the advent of new technology comes, at least in my mind, a need for faster Internet, and right now what Mother demands from her devices the phone company simply can't provide.
When they've complained in the past, I've brushed it off. Like I said, I'm paying for it, I decide what we'll have. However, they have complained once too often. I am giving up. Plus, it's gotten incredibly frustrating for me too, even if the last time I complained about it on WAF was 18 months ago. It indeed might be time for us to upgrade to faster speeds, even at the cost of, uh, higher cost. Finally, this five-year lock-in expires this year -- around Independence Day, in fact. I should keep track that at some point in the late spring I need to know the process by which I end Internet service. Hopefully by then I'll figure out a speed for ... well, probably Comcast at which I can afford to buy, and then I'll try and coordinate a time where I can go off of one provider and jump onto another without missing a beat. And then I hope Comcast will give us fast Internet without any drops, and then I'll hope to Buddha that their customer service won't be so legendarily terrible.
But that's in the summer. Right now I pray that I can publish this without any trouble.
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