Breakdown

In eight months I have had to experience Comcast, Verizon, Qwest, ClearWire, and Clear in the search for workable internet for my home office. Please don't make me do this anymore.


I live on a sailboat. I thought that getting internet wouldn't be tricky;  We're tied to the dock in the middle of a major, tech-savvy city. What has gone so horribly wrong?


Our first dock was in Everett. When the Verizon technician completed the installation there was a tasty weatherproof modem squatting on the dock, convenient and unobtrusive.The tech left early Friday morning and internet rocked until midday.  I was on the phone to tech support all weekend. They were clearly in India and clearly had no script to deal with marine installations and modems. After repeatedly being asked about the wall jack and explaining,again, that there was no wall, the customer service agent asked me to please "spell this 'boat'".  We got nowhere, and we got there painfully slowly.


Circumstances pointed to the dock telecom wiring, but I was unable to get through to anyone that was on my continent, let alone in my town.  A friend finally slipped me a phone number of the local office when it used to be GTE. One call reached a friendly voice that quickly dispatched a human. Said human opened the dock panel in front of me and we both saw the free floating wire. How were they going to fix that from India? What do people do who don't have the secret phone number? It was an unnerving customer experience, but the Internet was screaming fast and I was happy. 


Shortly thereafter an opportunity opened up to move to a quaint marina in downtown Seattle on Lake Union. It's a lovely location and in the heart of the city. The very techie city. Verizon was not allowed at this location, the city bequeathed that honor to Qwest. We began again.


Rivals clearly keeping tabs on each other, my Qwest experience was eerily similar to the Verizon experience, including the many calls to India, the lack of local knowledge, the insistence on swapping modems, and other nonsense.  Really, I don't mean to be an old coot, but in my day we could test point-to-point wiring. It was finally deemed not possible to receive Qwest with the ancient dock wiring and I was cut loose to find my own solution.


Several liveaboards were using Clearwire and liked it, so I listened to the pitch and bought it. It was supposed to be 3M speeds starting soon, so I figured I'd limp along until the speed increased. Weeks later Clear sent a new modem, told me  that my old modem would stop working soon and that I should use the new one to enjoy their new, superfast WiMax service.  I plugged the new modem in and watched it scan for a signal. That's all it did.  I put it away figuring the 'send out the new modems' department at Clear had gotten ahead of the 'start broadcasting the new signal' department. Indeed, the others on my dock that switched to the new modems and sent back the old modems lost service altogether.


The old service held until the morning of March 2, 2010. At seven a.m. my internet stopped cold. The old broadcast had ceased; it was the new modem or nothing. I brought it out and again watched it scan for a signal, the lights chasing each other endlessly. Damn. 


Customer service at Clear was quite different from the phone companies. I would reach people in Las Vegas or Florida, and their listening and note-taking skills were quite good.  Every time I called in they would read the notes, acknowledge that, yes, I see that you have to have the modem 50 feet up the mast to get a signal, but would you please tell us how many lights are lit? Please reset the modem. Please.


I could walk down the dock and see all the Clear modems in the windows of boats, all pressed against the glass as if to get as close to the broadcast tower as possible. They all give up in the same instant, their lights chasing, chasing....


I would call every day, and every day Clear would ask me to do the exact same routine of resetting the modem, as if they didn't know they had a transmission problem, as if I was the only person in Seattle complaining.


It took a month, but they finally 'rolled a truck' as they prefer to call sending technical support to help you. The lovely man plugged in the modem and moved it all around the boat before declaring that it didn't work.


And there you go. Have a nice day.


Now, we did get it to work, kinda. We put it in a special dry-bag, trussed it carefully and used special sailor ties to make sure we could determine its orientation and keep it from moving in the wind.  It would work for seconds at a time; long enough to download email with no pictures but not long enough to watch a video clip or upload something. Forget about online banking or blog maintenance. And since I make my living partly doing remote computer support, I was out of luck. But here it gets icky.


I received a notice from Clear that my service was about to be cut off for non payment. I had not paid in March because I spent the entire month on the phone with Clear trying to get my service to work. I was hoping they would notice and want to help. What they noticed was the individual times online, while not contiguous, added up to a lot. They wanted to be paid. Yes, they saw my point that my internet cut out and re-connected constantly and was virtually unusable for my needs. Still. I used those minutes, they wanted to be paid. I paid them.  I feel like an addict. I need the internet!


So. Now I have a Motorola USB stick (3G? 4G?) It has Clear branding all over it but the lack of real information is disheartening. It works, off and on. It's not fast, but it's OK. I have to go somewhere with a real internet to get work done, but I don't feel cut off and desperate. Oh, and of course it is ten dollars more every month. Never did achieve the mythical 3M that they promised when I signed up, but after the last few months I think I will just hush up.


Reflecting on my experience I remember that all of the people I was forced to interact with were quite nice. Every company, every person. The failings were in the decisions made by the people in charge. In the case of Clear, we were sold a service that did not exist as presented. Because they created expectations that could not be fulfilled by their service, calls flooded into tech support.  As a tech support person myself, this makes me angry; tech support is getting all the grief while design and roll-out get off scott-free? Are you kidding me?


But in all these companies, the techs were not allowed to troubleshoot, not allowed to go off script even if the problem as presented wasn't on the script. Each person I spoke to knew when their script made them say something illogical but they were tightly constrained and completely unable to help. 


I'm going to try to post this now. Again. I can't believe I'm almost back to the beginning of last summer when I would lose the signal every time a boat went through the Ballard Locks. Technology marches on, huh?  I'll just be floating here. Waiting.