Tale of woe.....

[m...@me.net]

Looks like a lot of people are getting ripped off and they don't know it.
Back in Aug of last year I had a G7 account and called to complain about slow
speeds. Turned out to be my old Arris modem was at fault. The BRC tech put a new
modem in and WOW! my speeds were 9M using speakeasy.net. How come I'm getting
more than the G7 speeds? The tech explained that everything was being upgraded
and my G7 was now G10 and that everyone would be informed in about a months time
officially.
Worked great for about a month and we did get the official "free" upgrade
notice.
Then speeds started to drop again. Got so bad that they would be up over 10G in
the early hours of the morning and went down hill gradually until I was getting
800K around 10pm. It was predictable. More people home the worse it was. Nights,
weekends and when the kids had a break from school. Went thru' the usual stuff -
call PTD who said there was definitely a problem who would then pass me to BRC
who would send a tech out because there are no tech support people at the main
BRC office after 5pm.
To cut a long story short, after 5 tech's in 4 months the last one (Friday
before Christmas) admitted that they have been funneling 800 lines thru one
"board" instead of 500 because one is down (since September!). Everything would
be OK after the holidays but to call ifit wasn't. Yeah right!
I found that BRC main office seems to either not know what is happening at the
other offices or out in the field. It turns out that the last tech called the
local office to get info on this problem. I assumed he was calling the main
office because it was during the day. I had been calling the main BRC number all
along and their tech people said there was nothing wrong as far as they knew.
Although, after a lot of bitching to a customer service rep she finally pulled
up the last guys report that effectively said a new downstream (something) was
needed in this area.
I finally decided to call the local office. Finally! Someone knew what I was
talking about! They offered me a rebate for the last 4 months and if they hear
from the supervisor (who isn't around at the weekends) that this is still not
being fixed they will charge me for Websurfer instead of the G10 until it's
fixed!
There has to be tons of people out there that don't know that they are getting
ripped off. The service rep. at the main office told me that unless people call
they never know if there is something wrong. I find that difficult to believe.
I'm guessing, from what I hear in my area, that most people just use the net for
surfing the web and email and wouldn't see much difference in performance
between Websurfer and G15 speeds. I don't know how the hardware works. Maybe
they put the different speed categories through different hardware so it's only
the G10, in my case, that are affected. Who knows.
The lesson I've learned is that you need to go through your local office because
it seems nothing gets back the main office at all.
We'll see what happens.

Jeff (Truebrit)

PS - I'm in the Dingmans Ferry area and the local office is in Milford.

[Rich Pierson]

m...@me.net wrote in news:i2g0o3lliiq2lon8g...@4ax.com:

Ya know what, in the real world of real internet such as T1's thru OC
[optical carrier-fiber] when you buy your bandwidth of say a 1.5 T1 or
155 meg OC or anything in between the provider does not care if you run
it full tilt day after day after day. You are buying the bandwidth not
content. Prolog is different, I got an 'excessive bandwith' usage email
and the apparent only solution is to upgrade to some other type of more
expensive account. Strangly enough I could not find any numbers on
prologs site as to what constitutes 'excessive usage' or 'acceptable
bandwith usages'. I wish the telcos would get off their collective asses
and get fios up here or better dsl.