T-Mobile Home Internet has been getting worse in my area, to the point it was intolerable. I finally applied for the Affordable Community Broadband program and was approved.
The ACB credit qualified me for free 60 Mbps down / 11 Mbps up on Comcast, and free is good, so I ditched the T-Mobile.
The T-Mobile Home Internet Nokia modem is absolute garbage. It could almost never reliably lock on to a 5G signal, and when it could, it usually didn’t even perform at the minimum speed that they guarantee in an area. They say they won’t sell service in an area unless you can get 25 Mbps, but routinely I was left with half or two thirds of that, and that was in between modem crashes. Sometimes six or seven per day.
I finally realized why it would crash so much. It’s because the thing is so full of bugs and they roll out new firmware constantly and it’s never any better than it was before, but also this modem is a portable space heater and eventually it will just fry itself. Before it konks out totally, it will just become unstable because of heat buildup, so you have to set it on top of a fan just so it won’t crash so much.
Anyway, with the free broadband from Comcast and the ACB program, I finally have a stable Internet connection again for the first time in a while and I’m not fighting with my spouse over the “worse than DSL in 2005” experience that T-Mobile Home Internet brings with it.
When I called to cancel T-Mobile, they got it canceled, but they made me figure out how to print off a shipping label, which means I had to forward it to FedEx near where my spouse works as a print job (because I hate printers), and I’ll pick it up on Monday (my birthday) along with a Buick that I’m closing a deal on. It’s going to be a very good day.
Just out of spite, I added “Super Crappy T-Mobile Home Internet Pod Enclosed. May it toast in the fires of Silicon Hell.” to the bottom of the shipping return label.
It is eye opening what having lousy Internet service for 6 months is like. The only actual reason I could see for buying this product is if you live in the middle of a cornfield and it’s this or satellite Internet.
The one upside is that the customer support people in the Philippines are always so nice to talk to.
I don’t blame them at all for this shitfest that T-Mobile calls an ISP, because they’re obviously not running the company. I just don’t think T-Mobile Home Internet is going to be a thing for much longer if it can’t do better than COMCAST.
While I can’t knock free, I also mistakenly called into the regular Comcast line before realizing that Internet Essentials is operated like another company. I noticed their paying customers don’t get a lot of support anymore.
Comcast has started closing customer service at night (used to be 24 hours a day) and forcing people to deal with a lot of menus and prompts and a chat robot on their website or SMS text messaging system and it takes 30 minutes of poking around telling it none of this applies before it will hand you off to a real person who can actually solve a problem. The rest is just this dumb “Have you tried unplugging it and plugging it back in or do you want to pay your bill now?” 500 times along the way.
ZDNet says that McDonalds will be like this pretty soon too.
I wonder what ordering a hamburger will be like when the machine can’t understand you and there’s nobody to help and customers start driving away in frustration. McDonalds is big, but they don’t have a monopoly on hamburgers and fries, so what works for Comcast won’t necessarily work for them.
Sam Walton’s management books should be a required reading everywhere.
My favorite quote was “There is only one boss, and that’s the customer, and he can fire everyone in the company from the CEO to the person stocking the shelves by taking his money elsewhere.”.
Unfortunately, we’re to the point where even Walmart is acting like that’s not true when, if they were a little smarter, they could kick Amazon in the nuts and walk away with all of that lost revenue.
The overall trend here is that big companies that already effectively have a money printing press and are more profitable than ever thanks to fake inflation (raising prices because they can and blaming it on the President or something) are also cutting customer service to the bone.
This mentality is a diseased way of thinking about customer service. They consider it a “department” instead of a way of running their business. An expense to be trimmed.
You’ll probably hang up the phone before you talk to a person after being filibustered by chat robots for so long that it puts Strom Thurmond’s action against the Civil Rights Act in a distant second place.
The whole scheme is to send you to a human as a last resort so that everyone who is too busy to deal with an issue goes away. If you’re calling to cancel something, you’re also not a priority even though good customer service means taking care of the customer when they don’t want to be your customer anymore.
In a free market, or at least one with some competition, this could never work. People could tell their friends, “Don’t use that business. It sucks. Can you believe how much it sucks?”, but when you have a monopoly on cable internet or have traditionally been a monopolist and public menace like Microsoft, you can get away with lousy customer service at that point, because you don’t have to please customers if you make it hard to run away.
Linus Torvalds once joked that if you manage to crash the Linux kernel with a program, it gets investigated, but if you tell someone you’ve crashed the Windows kernel, they just stare at you and say “I’ve got programs like that and they came with Windows.”.
It’s very clear why Comcast doesn’t fight Internet Essentials.
They have no reason to. Even at $10 a month they at least break even on you, and the ACB program even pays them for that.
The alternative is to draw serious regulatory attention to themselves and maybe get broken apart by the Sherman Antitrust Act.
To actually get to the “free Internet”, you have to sign up for three different things. Internet Essentials, which kicks you out to the FCC website for Lifeline, then you fill out an application with the National Verifier, and once approved, you get a code. You take it back to Comcast, they approve you for Internet Essentials, you activate your Internet account, and maybe pay your first bill of $9.95, and then you go back, apply for Comcast’s ACB program, and paste in the same National Verifier code, and then hopefully it takes you down to $0 a month for a while.
They don’t want that to be easy. If it was extremely easy, everyone would just click a button and go “$100 a month to Comcast for Internet? Click click, BULLSHIT!”.
In fact, they used to have a cool down period where you couldn’t have been a regular Comcast subscriber in the past 6 months, so that people wouldn’t cancel their paid service even if they qualified for Internet Essentials. Nasty.
I also noticed that Comcast is offering “low cost” PCs.
The Windows 11 model has slightly higher specs than the Chromebook. I’d suggest the Windows 11 model if Windows can be wiped off of a Dell Latitude 3120. They call it an educational laptop and their marketing page says “lesson learned”.
The only lesson with a $150 Windows computer is how poorly Windows runs on a $150 computer. It doesn’t run well on a good computer. How well do you think a “Celery” processor and 4 GB of RAM are going to hold up?
Fedora, on the other hand, could actually work out fine in this case.
I’ve been meaning to write a post about Fedora 36, which I’m using right now. The GNOME 42 and KDE spins have both come a long way towards being less bloated and far less notorious for memory leaks and more performant. KDE is even used on Pinebooks now.
Add in the fact that Fedora is also using ZRAM and Early-OOM, and it should hold up okay on 4 GB RAM. Windows 11 won’t.
One of the truly awful things about Windows 11 isn’t just that it’s a big rusty pig of the operating system world, it’s that the compressed memory setup isn’t even using an algorithm that is optimized for speed, so it slows you down so your OEM can screw you on RAM.
Fedora uses ZSTD compression for ZRAM and the BtrFS file system (which also reduces disk writes).
I think it would work fine on the Dell Latitude 3120, and it could turn a miserable experience the government is propping up Microsoft with into an enjoyable little computer that may even in fact run some old console emulators and Free Software games (including GZDOOM, obviously).
If the government is in the business of supporting low and lower-middle income people with computers, it ought not be spamming those people with malicious proprietary software like Windows 11, and then the other malicious software, such as ransomware, which inevitably ends up setting up camp in Windows 11, but as long as the user can at least fix it (which I don’t know if you can, so you’ll need to research this) by turning off “Secure Boot” and installing a Free and Open Source operating system, then they may want to take advantage of the super cheap hardware.
The Comcast xFI gateway wanted me to use an app to activate it, so I had the lineman take care of that for me before he left. Comcast could easily make it so your modem worked without installing spyware on your Android or iPhone, but they don’t.
Remember when they demanded to run a Windows program and then carpet bombed you with browser toolbars and trialware?
Luckily, I could just call an agent back then and say “Look, I don’t have Windows. Can you activate it on your end?”.
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