From AT&T to Spectrum: I Never Thought I'd Write That

I'm not the kind of guy who has historically acted on his knee-jerk reactions. Yes, there are times I act impulsively, as when I bought my house in Boynton Beach, Fla. in 2001, and especially when I bought my house in Greenville in 2006. In my defense, I made out like a bandit on the sale of my Boynton home when I sold it in 2006. During the housing boom, it more than doubled in value in the five-or-so years I owned it. Too soon to tell with my Greenville home, but I certainly won't sustain a loss.

Removing those two decisions from the averaging, I usually think things through. I may still not make the best decision, but it isn't because I haven't thought about it. It's taken not one, but several factors to nudge me into changing gyms. It's been a progression of smaller things that have morphed into an avalanche of reasons to move on after 11 years. Some are almost insignificant, like changing the music played over the sound system from various satellite-radio stations alternating from classic rock to current pop, to permanently turning to some head-banging station where screeching and hollering pass for music. They have been torturing the membership with this for nearly a month. It's like a Chinese water torture: drip, drip, drip. Why not just waterboard us as we enter and get it over with? Other deciding factors are larger, like the machines not being maintained. I haven't pulled the trigger on the change yet. That will come sometime on Monday, but the decision is made.

You may well be thinking where in the hell is he going with this? Stay with me.

Also early on Monday, if Comcast/Spectrum is on schedule, I will replace my AT&T Internet connection with Spectrum's Internet. At least I hope they are on schedule; AT&T will terminate my service at midnight on Sunday.

The reason I am penning this entry to Clanging Bell today (Saturday), rather than my usual Clanging Bell day (Sunday), is that I've been knocked off the Internet twice already this morning. And, it isn't even 9:00. I will be at home the next two weeks and have a ton of work to do before returning to the road in mid April. I have some big assignments to knock out. Today was to be a research day for a couple of those assignments. I can't research if my Internet isn't performing. 

A little background. Because of the treeline to the south of my house, satellite TV doesn't work for me. I have two choices for TV content: AT& T Uverse or Comcast/Spectrum. I had Comcast when I first moved to Greenville, but it has positively the worst DVR in the industry. It is severely limited in the number of channels it can record simultaneously. I dumped it after a year for Uverse. When I switched to Uverse, I also changed my phone service from Verizon to AT&T. My Internet service had always been with AT&T. Yes, I bundled. Perhaps the biggest scam in the digital universe.

At the time I started with AT&T Internet, streaming still wasn't much of a thing. Also, I wasn't uploading videos to Vimeo or YouTube. The 12 mbps (Laughable, I know.) I originally purchased gave me all the steam I needed for what I was doing. Even when uploading my short 3- to 5-minute just3things videos to Vimeo, upload time was reasonable. Once I began BEER2WHISKEY, which has segments running as long as 30 minutes, suddenly it was taking five, six, even seven hours to upload to YouTube. I mitigated that by uploading over night. I was unhappy, but making do.

I recently stayed at a Ritz Carlton. While there, I finished editing a 20-min B2W segment and went about uploading it. It uploaded in about 90 minutes. This was four hours less than it would have required at home. I took a giant step in making the decision to switch.

In the past couple of months, streaming at my house has taken a nose dive. Often the picture quality is like watching an episode of "Bewitched" on a 1969 Admiral table-top TV with rabbit ears. There were times I couldn't even get Amazon TV to come in. This issue became progressively worse to the point that between 4 pm and 8 pm on weekdays, I can't stream at all. I suspect it has something to do with kids being home from school and gaming or whatever. AT&T's broadband during those hours apparently is something akin to the Blue Ridge Parkway during fall-foliage season: stop and go. As I say, in recent days on my PC, my Internet drops two or three times an hour.

I returned home from my Ritz Carlton stay, and checked on my current Internet plan with AT&T. This was when I realized the $64 a month I was paying was only giving me 12 mbps. But hey, they had another plan that, for $2 more, I could get up to 24 mbps. I “upgraded” to that two or three weeks ago. Clearly the key phrase in that upgrade offer is, “up to 24 mbps.” There was not a prayer that I was going to actually see 24 mbps or anything close to it. I did see it up to 10 mbps while I was streaming something from Amazon TV, but on a good day it hovers around 6 mbps. During peak times, it was more like 2 or 3 mbps. Two bucks doesn't buy you much in the world of broadband.

Early last week I checked out Spectrum. I receive solicitations from them like I owe them money: often two per week. Normally that would be enough to prevent my reaching out to them, but, as I mentioned above, my choices here are limited. The offer I found and picked is 400 mbps for less than $50. Seems like a bargain, right? I took it and made an appointment for 8 am this coming Monday to have it installed.

Now came calling AT&T to cancel my current Internet service. I got Paul from AT&T's customer service on the phone. He's located in Dallas, he was quick to tell me, letting me know he wasn't Bob from New Delhi. To his (and AT&T's) credit, he didn't try to keep me on the phone for 20 minutes attempting to talk me out of canceling the Internet portion of my service. But he did tell me he wished I had called before taking the plunge with Spectrum. You see, he confided to me, my area qualifies for an upgrade to 100 mbps that only entails an AT&T tech showing up and attaching some sort of box to the side of my house. Oh, and the upgraded service would cost $14 less than I am currently paying.

Are you kidding me?

Rather than instilling some degree of buyer's remorse in me, the double-secret-probation offer ticked me off. If this upgrade is available in my area, why was this the first I had heard of it. When I upgraded a few weeks earlier, this 100 mbps option wasn't on the list of available services. I never received an e-mail nor a snail-mail letter notifying me of the 100 mbps option. Nope, apparently this is something they keep in their back pocket as a hail Mary to try to retain defecting customers. It would have worked on me had I not already scheduled new service. Problem was, I was already over the wall. I had already defected.

So, beginning Monday (fingers crossed), I will have new and much improved Internet. I am stoked.

I Stumbled as the Technology Around Me Crumbled

I'm not the kind of guy who embraces a lot of change. Yes, there are things that need changing; I get that. However, rocking the boat just to see who or what falls out, isn't something I do for kicks.

Last month I was on the road for two straight weeks. Well, I was back in Greenville once for a whopping 11 hours and home for about 9 hours of that. It was long enough to unpack, do a load of wash, repack, grab six hours of sleep and get back to the airport. Sometime between that brief home stand and my final return three days later, all hell broke lose.

Maybe that's being a little too dramatic.

For the couple of weeks I've been back, I've been in connectivity/technology hell. I'm ready to gut punch a kitten. I've had it with computers, printers, personal devices, AT&T, whoever the jerks are who make GoPro, Apple, iTunes, and the list goes on and on. My head is pounding just thinking about it.

I get alerts from Duke Energy whenever there is a significant power outage in my area. Apparently there was one during the three-day period mentioned above. The lights went out at my home. I have no clue how long the house was without electricity, but it was long enough that I received two messages about it over a 24-hour period. If I lived in Wisconsin, a 12-plus-hour outage in February might have meant frozen water pipes, as well as other catastrophes. But, that's why I live south of the Mason-Dixon line.

No, what I did come home to was all of my digital clocks flashing, and all the timers controlling lights when I'm out of town turning those lights on at 2:30 in the afternoon. I reset all of those only to have Duke Power, the next day, intentionally shut down electricity in the area to “make some improvements.” Whatever that means. I got to reset everything all over again. (Oh and then the time change: another round of resetting it all.)

It wasn't until that afternoon that I finally fired up my PC to do a little work and found my Wi-Fi wasn't working. I couldn't connect to the Internet. I rebooted everything. I unplugged my ATT gateway and plugged it back in. Nada. My network didn't even appear when accessing available Wi-Fi networks. I was on the phone with the AT&T robot three times trying different troubleshooting solutions. By now, I had burned through more than two hours. I was steaming. You see, I can't make phone calls from inside my house with AT&T without Wi-Fi calling. Each call entailed me heading out to the carport in 40-degree temps to make calls.

Eventually, I got a human being on the phone. Although English was obviously not her first language, I had her repeat things until I understood what she was saying. Sometimes I got the gist of what she was saying on the first repeat and sometimes on the third or fourth. For some reason known only to the gremlins constantly attacking our technology, during all of the power outages, my Wi-Fi network reset itself to the factory network name and password. The technician I spoke with couldn't explain it, or if she did, I didn't realize it. There was a lot of chattering going on. We reset the password and I had Wi-Fi again. Of course, that meant going through my long list of Wi-Fi-connected devices, including outside security cameras, and reconnecting. Another 90 minutes up in smoke.

While in Florida during my two-week sabbatical, I decided the issue with my phone signal reception was due to the phone. I was having the same problem making calls and sending texts where I was staying as I was at home. Because one of my friends I stay with works for Verizon, he was familiar with the closest AT&T cell site, which also happens to host a Verizon site. They have no problem with their cell-phone signals. Although my phone was only 13 months old, I decided to pull the trigger and replace it. I ordered a new phone, which was waiting for me when I returned at the end of my trip.

Of course, signal reception isn't any better on the new phone. I'm keeping it, however, because it's a little smaller than the phone it replaces. It's easier to slip in my back pocket. When I bought the phone just over a year ago, it marked a switch from Apple to Android. After nearly 14 months, I am still not an Android fan, but I stuck with Android because for the last 12 months of using my third iPhone, it was updating twice or more a week. What a pain. Finally, somewhere in all that updating, it caused the GPS function on the phone to quit working. The phone knew where it was as long as I was stationary, but the moment I began to move, it had no clue where it was. I couldn't use Google Maps or any other direction app. That was enough to finish me with iPhones.

Since I've been with Android, I've been trying to figure out a way to move all of the iTunes music I've purchased over the years to my Android phone. Last week I finally broke down and spent $40 (annual subscription) on an app to transfer iTunes music from my iPod to my PC and then back to my Android phone. I'll eventually cancel the subscription. I have been able to make the transfers, but rather than playlists, the songs have transferred in file folders. I struggled with being able to get the phone to play songs in succession. I had to click on each song to play it. Another blood-pressure raising task.

I'm please to report, however, that I finally overcame the song-transfer issue. For the first time in 16 months, I'm able to share my entire music library with my Android phone and play songs in whichever car I am driving. A small victory, but I'll take them as they come.

Over the Christmas holiday, I bought a GoPro on a site called Daily Sale. I get an update of new sale items each day. I really have never had an interest in GoPro. Recently, though, I've been thinking about doing just3things car reviews from behind the wheel. As I was scrolling through the sale items one day I came across an $80 deal on GoPro Hero 3+ cameras for $80. I couldn't pass it up. I ordered it. It's arrival required about two weeks. Once delivered, it sat, unopened for another month. I finally got around to opening the shipping box since returning from my two week trip.

Once I had the shipping box open, I discovered the GoPro in a plain white box. Somehow I totally missed the fact that this was, in fact, a refurbished camera. Had I realized that, I would have opened it sooner. Once open, I had to buy a mini SD card. I got on Amazon ordered that, as well as one for my new phone. I also bought a couple of other GoPro accessories like a mount and spare batteries. A couple of days ago I watched a YouTube video on the subject and then set up my Hero 3+. I also downloaded the App allowing me to perform some basic operations on the GoPro through my phone, as well as use my phone as a monitor. Of course, the phone and GoPro wouldn't automatically sync. No, I need the serial number to do it manually. Where's the serial number? you may ask. It's supposed to be in the battery compartment. Fat chance. The serial-number sticker is missing leaving behind some glue residue in its place. Had the phone not been sync'd previously, I could do it with the factory settings, but that's not an option either. I reached out to Daily Sale. More on this in a future Clanging Bell.

As part of my Wi-Fi fiasco, the Wi-Fi connection between my PC and Canon printer was severed. I couldn't get the printer back online. I attempted to delete it from my PC, download a new driver and whatever else I could think of. After fooling with it for more than an hour, I was well over my tolerance threshold. I sprang a gasket. I was fed up with fighting technology. I got on Amazon and ordered a new printer. Of course, even though the new printer is from the same Canon line as the old one, it takes different ink cartridges. They looked the same in the online photos, but they are different. Consequently the box of spare cartridges is worthless to me. I'm hanging on to the old printer. It will rest in the upstairs spare bedroom until I have put enough distance between my breakdown and recovery to attempt to get it up and functioning again.

I am fed up with AT&T. I'm going to have to live with its lack of cell coverage for another year. I'm not going through all the crap associated with reconfiguring my phone for a new carrier. But I will be shopping for a new broadband provider. I am too exhausted to lay it all out here, but even after doubling my broadband with AT&T, I still can't stream anything between 4 p.m. and 7 p.m. I assume it has something to do with kids being home from school and, en masse, logging on to game or whatever. All the extra traffic on AT&T's system knocks me off. It's fine earlier in the day and later in the evening. So, I'll waste more time and expend more energy (physical and emotional) addressing this issue.

Oh, the humanity.....