Three days ago I wrote about a morning without Internet, as Spectrum did a network “upgrade” in our area. Since then our Internet service has been unreliable and sporadic. Network download speeds used to be 300+ Mbps – a good true broadband speed. Now, when we have it at all, it’s averaging 7-15 Mbps download. That’s not really enough to stream TV. Something is broken.

Contacting Spectrum customer support is futile. I’ve done that 4-5 times over the last few days. Every time they collect the same information, tell me to do the same thing – unplug then reconnect their cable modem and my Wifi router. That almost always gets service back, albeit the degraded state of single digit Mbps downloads. But this can’t go on.

I used to run large corporate networks, and based on my experience this is a situation where their network change (they’ve called it an upgrade – I call BS on that) has introduced a fault and instability in the part of the network that serves us. Could be a bad interface, could be a software/routing fault, could be a single bad transceiver in our path. The network isn’t entirely down (what they call an outage), but it’s unacceptably slow and sporadic.

So now I’m looking for alternatives. The best two in my area are wireless – use TMobile’s network or Starlink’s space-based service. I think I’ll try TMobile – right this minute I can get 350+ Mbps wireless service on my phone. And their home Internet service price is $45/month, as opposed to the $60/month (?) we pay Spectrum.

It’s a shame that Spectrum is so incompetent. But cable companies have been around a long while, and they’ve become uncompetitive. Low quality and bad customer service for an uncompetitive price. But they stay in business because there are few alternatives and switching is hard. Hell, even I don’t want to switch, but enough is enough.

I like the idea of Starlink, but (a) it’s quite a bit more expensive than the Tmobile cellular 5G option, and (b) I just don’t trust a Musk company at the moment. He’s a flake – a very talented flake, but after his political stunts and his idiotic destruction of Twitter, I’m not sure I want a core service like home Internet at his mercy.

Soooo…off we go to a new service provider. Probably a new set of problems, but I’m fed up with the current provider. I can’t emphasize enough how fundamental Internet access is these days, at least in my life. It’s almost as important as electricity and water. In fact, thinking clearly about what it takes to live in the modern world, it’s clean water first, then reliable electricity, then reliable/fast data (Internet). Data brings TV, music, news and phone service along for the ride.