For the past dozen or so years I've been all of:
most of which require huge chunks of bandwidth and roughly 100% uptime. I've had Comcast and been quite happy. Qwest and been relatively unhappy. A neighborhood T-1 and been exceedingly unhappy. Rapidwave and been quite happy. So happy I resisted getting Comcast when it finally appeared in my neighborhood after a ten year letter writing campaign by my neighbors in the development.
Rapidwave was one of those microwave antenna providers. I got the business class service with a dedicated IP and a lot of bandwidth and no service caps. I've had excellent service with only one decrease in bandwidth that they fixed in only a few days after I called about it.
A handful of months ago they sent an email saying they were changing their infrastructure and that we needed to redo our settings in our router. No biggie except it was during one of my trips out of the country. So I emailed and they said it wasn't a really big deal, I could do it over the next month or so. When I returned I changed the settings and pretty much forgot about it.
Then about a month after that I got an email saying they were being bought by some other company, the name of which meant nothing to me, and that absolutely nothing would be changing. So I didn't worry about it.
Another month goes by and I get an email from the new company pointing out that they were also the proud owners of Digis. Oh, no. Drat. I'd always ignored Digis in my search for internet providers. For the most part they charged way too much, bundled meaningless packages, and hidden way under the fine print there were bandwidth caps and overall traffic caps. If you only ever check emails with text only, and never post photos to Facebook, then it's a cheap enough option. But 100 photos on Facebook right off the camera and you've exceeded your cap way into high dollar service.
But they promised that they would stay separated and nothing would change. Then a month after that I got a bill from Digis. It said that Digis was the new main company and I was a proud and happy Digis customer. I would need to log in to my console and arrange for auto withdrawal and paperless billing or pay penalties and fees. Wowsers. So I logged in and saw that my old info was still in the system and that I could just continue the auto withdrawal and then checked the box for paperless billing.
On a whim I started digging around I found my bandwidth stats. Starting the day I switched my router settings. I also saw that for every single one of the months I'd come within about 50 Facebook photos worth of exceeding my cap. Thus nearly resulting in a billing increase. Obviously this whole turn of events had been in the works for months and we all had been carefully led down the Digis path.
For the icing on the cake, it appears that the old "Counterstrike Thursday" and "Ditch Class Youtube Festival" are still going strong. In an older neighborhood across Utah Lake I used to notice some severe bandwidth decreases (neighborhood T-1). So much so that I couldn't receive text emails. It would time out for about four hours every Thursday evening. Then around 10 PM it would suddenly stop. I called tech support and they said "Oh, yeah, there's a group of gamers down the street that play Counterstrike every Thursday evening" And they were using their ISP to do it? Wouldn't it have been cheaper and more efficient and less intrusive to set up their own wireless network outside their wires? Anyway, I notice similar patterns here on various days. Especially now that school is out for the summer.
So why is this here on this blog? You might have noticed that I've been posting almost no videos and about half of the photos that I used to post on all my other blogs. I've seriously decreased my internet usage here to avoid fees, and that means until I can move, you'll be seeing a bit less of me on the off weeks I'm in Utah. I'll soon be abandoning my Utah location totally in favor of one in Colorado. At that point we'll find out if the old Rapidwave policy of "no contract month-to-month" is still in effect.
- Developer
- Programmer
- Systems Administrator
- Database Administrator
- Video Producer
- Photographer
- Writer
- Community Manager
most of which require huge chunks of bandwidth and roughly 100% uptime. I've had Comcast and been quite happy. Qwest and been relatively unhappy. A neighborhood T-1 and been exceedingly unhappy. Rapidwave and been quite happy. So happy I resisted getting Comcast when it finally appeared in my neighborhood after a ten year letter writing campaign by my neighbors in the development.
Rapidwave was one of those microwave antenna providers. I got the business class service with a dedicated IP and a lot of bandwidth and no service caps. I've had excellent service with only one decrease in bandwidth that they fixed in only a few days after I called about it.
A handful of months ago they sent an email saying they were changing their infrastructure and that we needed to redo our settings in our router. No biggie except it was during one of my trips out of the country. So I emailed and they said it wasn't a really big deal, I could do it over the next month or so. When I returned I changed the settings and pretty much forgot about it.
Then about a month after that I got an email saying they were being bought by some other company, the name of which meant nothing to me, and that absolutely nothing would be changing. So I didn't worry about it.
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| Trick or Treat? or just Tricks? |
But they promised that they would stay separated and nothing would change. Then a month after that I got a bill from Digis. It said that Digis was the new main company and I was a proud and happy Digis customer. I would need to log in to my console and arrange for auto withdrawal and paperless billing or pay penalties and fees. Wowsers. So I logged in and saw that my old info was still in the system and that I could just continue the auto withdrawal and then checked the box for paperless billing.
On a whim I started digging around I found my bandwidth stats. Starting the day I switched my router settings. I also saw that for every single one of the months I'd come within about 50 Facebook photos worth of exceeding my cap. Thus nearly resulting in a billing increase. Obviously this whole turn of events had been in the works for months and we all had been carefully led down the Digis path.
For the icing on the cake, it appears that the old "Counterstrike Thursday" and "Ditch Class Youtube Festival" are still going strong. In an older neighborhood across Utah Lake I used to notice some severe bandwidth decreases (neighborhood T-1). So much so that I couldn't receive text emails. It would time out for about four hours every Thursday evening. Then around 10 PM it would suddenly stop. I called tech support and they said "Oh, yeah, there's a group of gamers down the street that play Counterstrike every Thursday evening" And they were using their ISP to do it? Wouldn't it have been cheaper and more efficient and less intrusive to set up their own wireless network outside their wires? Anyway, I notice similar patterns here on various days. Especially now that school is out for the summer.
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| Digis billing and service issues? |
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