Les Bonnes Choses

Last evening, while I was Skyping with Rebecca, my obnoxious doorbell (it plays the Westminster Chimes) rang. I went to the door to find a couple of Jehova's Witn - er, I mean, AT&T representatives who were trying to drum up some sales in the neighbourhood. Apparently, with the recent upgrades to their network in the neighbourhood, they can offer me a package comparable to the one I have with Comcast.

At this point, you may be asking yourself why would I bother going to the trouble of switching providers to get the exact same thing? Well, for one thing, AT&T has a more a la carte offering. I can, for example, get the package that includes only 100 versus 200 cable channels (there are only about half a dozen channels included in the 200 channel package that we would watch anyways, and all of the favourites, such as the Food Network,and Discovery are in both packages). There's the arguable advantage of AT&T's DSL (not shared) line versus Comcast's cable (shared) line. Comcast has also gotten a bad rep for bandwidth throttling. We don't really watch alot of movies (mostly because most of what Hollywood puts out is not worth seeing once, let alone twice), and my retro music tastes guarantee that I'm not going to be downloading much music (if I like it, I probably already have it), but I like to stay current with each passing season of Good Eats, and Linux distributions are best gotten through bittorrent (a legal and legitimate use, I might add). Finally, there is this issue of my first Comcast bill for $295, for what I expected to be a $119/month service.

Quoi? Venez encore une fois?

Hidden fees and installation charges inflated that price like a clown with a bicycle pump. And some balloons. The clown: he's inflating balloons with the pump, you see. To make balloon animals.

Anyways, the point is, that sort of crap doesn't sit right with me. Installation fees came to $130. They don't exactly go out of their way to highlight that in their advertising, or indeed, even when ordering their service. They even gave me a wireless router, inferior to the one I already own, and charged me $2 to rent it for the month. I can't say I'm even really satisfied with the installation. Because we don't own the house, I couldn't authorize the cable guy to actually route the cable to a useful spot in the house as that would likely entail putting a hole in a wall or ceiling. Consequently, all of the Comcast equipment is connected to a rather awkwardly run length of cable across the fireplace mantle to an only marginally more acceptable location that is still across the house from our PCs. Someone less familiar with computers than I would be at a loss for getting this particular computer networked.

So, I did some research on AT&T's offerings, and if I can be assured that: 1) The $129 I was quoted will be final charge on each and every bill they send me, and 2) they can do a better job locating their equipment than could the Comcast people, then I will consider jumping ship. I had initially raised the objection that I was in a 1 year contract with Comcast, but was then told that they can't use contracts, and in any case, the $75 early termination fee that I would be charged would be more than defrayed by the $100 incentive for signing up.

This was a pretty long post which also closely approximates the amount of time I spent at the door while Rebecca looked on at my frozen Skype image, wondering whether I had been shot. When I returned, I explained what had just transpired and reminded her that we got this place in a quiet upper-middle-class neighbourhood so that our delicate non-gun-toting central Canadian sensibilities would not be offended*.

*The Western provinces, they like their guns. They also like Steven Harper.