The Best Internet Service is ... (the one I already have, plus my phone hotspot?)

 I am visiting my wife's family in SW Michigan; they have Xfinity (aka Comcast) internet service. Late evening Wednesday night I was up discussing books with my niece and tried my computer on the wifi network in their home.

I have been using the "speed test" that just comes up when you Google "speed test" to tell when my home (T-Mobile) needs a reboot, which sometimes it does once or twice a day. But I tried it on the Michigan Xfinity service and wow, 100 megabit download; 50 upload! Really fast DNS response (one of the problems with T-Mobile) ... I said to myself: I'm getting this when I get back to Seattle!

But! Then I tried it at "prime time" (6:30 pm local time) and it ... crawled. Oh, right: Comcast back end infrastructure is shared among all users ... and Comcast has apparently oversold it based on the back end equipment they have. I was trying to do a timesheet for my job, which I do online every Friday night. I couldn't get it to respond even at 10pm ...

I then looked at Astound (formerly Xwave) ... but their online reviews were terrible ... multiday outages way too often!

I finally resorted to my phone (a Google Pixel 6) hotspot, which peaks at about 10Mb/second, got done what I needed to do, and turned it off!

So: T-Mobile is not shared and plenty fast enough when it doesn't need to be rebooted (despite slow-ish DNS response sometimes) ... so I guess I'll stick with that, of course with my phone hotspot as backup.

 

Never buy a locked phone: an anecdote about unlocking a T-Mobile

T-Mobile is known for annoying AT&T and the rest of the industry by some of their pricing policies and I therefore had them filed under sort of the 'virtuous rebel' flag:

But it turns out they behave more like the Empire when you want to leave:

My wife and I started trimming Stupid Expenses, and when I looked and found that I was paying $71/month to T-Mobile for worse coverage than I can get with Cricket (see my plug for Cricket elsewhere in this blog) at $45, I had to make that change.

Naive youth that I am, I just assumed that virtuous T-mobile would automatically unlock your phone when you finished paying for it (we had) ... silly me.

I took the phone to Cricket and got the new Cricket SIM card installed and only then found out the phone was locked. I called T-Mobile to get it unlocked ... and found some unbelievable stalling practices they use:

• "Check for an email in about an hour" with instructions for unlocking, which will take another 24 hours after that.
• The email didn't arrive, so I wound up calling back once more and 'chatting' once after that
• I stopped at their retail store, who tried to help but told me I had to call customer service ...
• Finally, the Cricket rep told me how typical this all was and that I had to just ask for the supervisor at T-Mobile to get things moving

This finally worked; I gave her a shorter email address and finally watched it arrive while I was on the phone, and said thanks and hung up.

It then took about 22 hours for the actual unlock to happen ... now the next day I finally got two more of those (intentionally?) glacially slow emails ...

What modern internet-connected organization would tolerate email taking 24-36 hours to arrive unless they wanted it that way?

Goodbye and good riddance, T-mobile ... you lost my good will on the way out.