Rolling the dice on a new ISP

Today I’m hanging around waiting for the Comcast guy to show up. You know how that works: They give you a two- or three-hour window for when they’ll be there, so you can’t go for a run, or take a shower or walk the dog. I’m even reluctant to go out back and pull weeds, since I’d probably never hear the doorbell. And then I’d face another long season on hold, trying to reschedule.

It’s a pain in the ass, changing internet providers. I’m only doing it because of a bigger pain in the ass: a persistent series of little outages, wherein AT&T’s DSL modem blinks red for no discernible reason and everything that depends on the Internet — around here, that’s quite a bit — stutters to a halt. Sometimes I’m unaware of it until I hear the wife cursing downstairs; other times I am in the middle of saving a WordPress entry that subsequently needs to be rewritten. I’ve been known to curse, too. The problem is particularly acute when we have three devices (iPhone, laptop and TV) competing for what seems to be a niggardly amount of bandwidth.

So it’s back to Comcast. Against the wife’s better judgment, I’m opting to pay extra for some increased speed. We’ll see how that works. Sometimes you get what you pay for, sometimes you don’t. Comcast’s promotional material suggests I’ll be able to stream several IMAX movies while simultaneously downloading the entire Library of Congress and controlling planetary weather patterns. I’ll be happy if we can have more than one device using the Internet at the same time, with maybe one or two outages a year.

A man can hope. In the meantime, a man can also pray — that he’s doing the right thing in abandoning the devil he knows for one he doesn’t. If this doesn’t bring a dramatic improvement in our online environment, I have a feeling I’ll be hearing about it.