REAL High Speed Internet

     You may remember one of my earlier blogs about slow to NO Internet entitled Surfing Thru a Straw.  Well, the exact thing happened again last week.  You might think, no that isn't possible but it is and it did.  My Internet, along with thousands in my general vicinity, was slow for three days then completely out of service for four days.  After the third day, the company was no longer even taking trouble reports, there was just a recording saying an outage existed for my area.  Really?  Awesome deduction, can you just fix it?  I even notified management of the problem on the first day.  It was determined to be in the downtown office early on(because it was so soon from the last time??).  Oh well!  I was told on the third day they were waiting on a "maintenance window"!  That means they were waiting till after midnight to take it down and fix it...  I said, "it's not working now, why wait?"
  
      With two college students in the house, not to mention that we've all become somewhat dependant on the Internet, I was ticked.  My loyalty only goes so far...  I picked up the phone and called Charter!  I spoke to Laura who said she could have my service installed in three days.  That was on the second day of the outage.
 
     On Friday, my installation day, I woke up excited.  Just for fun, I turned on the computer and discovered my normal 1.5M/sec service was back up.  Wow, someone finally fixed the problem, but too late to save this customer.  But that's okay, BellSouth's old customer service was WAY too good, right AT&T????  I turned the computer off and thought, "never mind"!

  
   
     My Charter tech called around 1PM and arrived about 1:15PM.  I have to admit that seeing a Charter truck in my driveway was something I never expected to see!  He was finished a short time later and my old BellSouth modem lay silent.  No lights, no power, no service...  kinda like usual! 
  
     My DSL speed, however, was soaring!  12M/sec is totally awesome!!!!  This is the way the Internet is supposed to be!  I click on something and it is there!  I don't wait on YouTube videos anymore.  The feeling was even better than when I went from "dial-up" to 1.5Meg/sec.  It was blazing fast!  A couple of months ago, I purchased Apple TV, and although happy with it overall, it was not what I had expected.  Well, with 12MEG service, my opinion of it has changed.  Something similar will be the future of television.  Choosing what you want to watch, instead of being force fed network garbage, definitely has it's advantages.

     I also priced the only other option, which was 4G cell coverage, but it was cost prohibitive.  I'm happy with my choice to go with Charter DSL.  The switchover was easy because I already had a separate router behind my BellSouth modem.  The Charter technician got his modem up and running.   I unplugged from one to the other and It was business as usual... well, it worked and was very, very fast!

     I'm sure that I am not seeing the big picture when I look at various companies Internet delivery service.  What I see are every one's tiny delivery options costing the customer a tremendous amount of money.  The Japanese seem to be way ahead of us on this.  I recently watched a video showing their Ultra High Definition service.  It is 16 times the clarity of HD.  A true 33 megapixel picture.  They plan to begin broadcasting it around the year 2020.  We don't have anything like it nor can any company deliver the bandwidth required.  Our companies are just milking subscribers for 3D image trickery.  It is a short sighted philosophy.  The pipes to homes need to be larger... think fiber optic to the house!  I've heard Verizon in California is focusing in this direction.  With fiber optics the bandwidth is virtually unlimited.  It is the network of the future.  Companies who are focusing on wireless broadcast spectrum are going to be left behind.   Wireless is too limited and spectrum is very expensive...  but hey, it's just my opinion!