08.21.10
Posted in Media & Internet at 9.16 pm by Caitlin
We FINALLY have internet up and running at our new home. This has been a major saga!
We had an awesome cable internet provider in San Francisco but unfortunately they don’t serve our new area. So we were in the market for a new internet company.
I consulted DSL Reports to see if I could find another small cable or DSL provider with good customer reviews. That’s how I found Astound in the first place. Unfortunately this only led to dead ends, such as business wireless providers that would charge north of $100 per month.
I knew that as a last resort I could go to Comcast for cable. However, I was trying to avoid this if at all possible. Firstly, I checked out their pricing and it was quite expensive. Secondly, I have never heard anyone say a good word about Comcast – they seem to be one of the most-hated companies in America.
There were no other cable companies in my area so I started looking into DSL. Every DSL company I spoke to said that I would need to get an AT&T phone line and switch it over. They couldn’t confirm DSL availability for my address without a phone number. Since you can get a phone line through cable, I clearly didn’t want to order a phone number for the purposes of DSL if I was going to end up with cable anyway.
The only company that could confirm DSL availability for my address was AT&T. And unfortunately our address was coming up in the system as NOT served by DSL. Given that we are in the middle of a Silicon Valley town, I was shocked! -1 to AT&T.
Just as we were on the verge of ordering Comcast cable, I found out from a neighbour downstairs that she was an AT&T DSL customer. There are only four apartments in the building and AT&T was saying that apartments 1 and 3 could get DSL but apartments 2 and 4 could not, despite the fact that 2 and 4 are closer to the phone line. She was in the process of moving apartments within the same building and stood to lose her service. -1 to AT&T.
Fortunately my neighbour managed to talk to an engineer who confirmed that this was an error and if there was DSL to the building it would be to the entire building. +1 to AT&T. He said that he would update the addresses in the system but it would take a week before it would update for the sales and customer service departments. -1 to At&T.
Once this process was complete, I tried to order DSL from AT&T. I looked at other DSL providers but AT&T offered a discount for bundling phone and internet and had a pretty sweet special that would give me a very high speed for a year at a much cheaper price. +1 to AT&T. The downside was that I was locked into a contract for a year even though I wasn’t yet sure about the quality of service. -1 to AT&T.
I decided to go with it anyway on the basis of my neighbor’s experience but when I tried to order the phone and internet online, the system wouldn’t let me select internet as an option, despite confirming the availability of DSL to my home. -1 to AT&T.
AT&T’s website has a system where you can chat to help/sales agents, which is a great facility when you really don’t want to spend lots of time and money on the phone. +1 to AT&T. The online chat agent told me to put through an order for home phone and an order for DSL without home phone separately and then call to merge the orders. I did so but when I called to merge the orders I was told this was incorrect advice and they would have to cancel the order for DSL without home phone and do a new one, attaching it to the phone line. -1 to AT&T.
I ordered the DSL line to be attached to the home phone order but I was unable to cancel the order for DSL without home phone until 24 hours had gone by. -1 to AT&T. I waited until the time had passed then phoned back and cancelled the order. I was very clear about which order to keep alive and which order to cancel and thankfully AT&T got this right. +1 to AT&T.
We bought a modem through AT&T because we didn’t have one (we had returned the previous one to Astound) and we wanted to ensure compatibility. It was expensive – $75 including postage just for a modem (we already had a wireless router). -1 to AT&T. When it showed up, it was without voice filters and there was a message saying “this compartment intentionally left empty (filters not required for customers without AT&T voice service)”. Since we had ordered voice services, we did need filters. -1 to AT&T.
I called AT&T and explained the situation. They said they would send me voice filters and it should take two days to get to me. +1 to AT&T. At my request, they credited my account for an extra week since I was yet to start getting service. +1 to AT&T.
When the voice filters arrived on Thursday, we plugged everything in but the DSL still did not work. -1 to AT&T. I called the help desk on Friday and they eventually confirmed a fault on the line. They said they could send an engineer that day. +1 to AT&T. But they said the engineer’s slot was between 10am and 8pm. -1 to AT&T.
Fortunately, the engineer showed up at midday. +1 to AT&T. The fault was not in our house but further down the line. He managed to fix it. +1 to AT&T.
When I tried to register, I couldn’t do this in Firefox or Chrome. -1 to AT&T. The website claimed to support Safari, but this didn’t work either, even though I had the latest version. -1 to AT&T. The engineer brought his Windows laptop upstairs and I used that to register. +1 to AT&T
When my husband came home, he tried to set up the wireless router. AT&T wouldn’t authenticate the router and after an hour of fiddling with the configurations, everything was broken. -1 to AT&T.
I called the help desk again this morning, though I eventually shunted them over to talk to my husband. They said they didn’t support Linksys routers and seemed to want to put everything back so we could only connect via an ethernet cable one machine at a time. -1 to AT&T. Eventually, after a lot of arguing and questions, it turned out that the password for configuring modems and routers was different to the password that I had set up when I registered. I had never been given this password so presumably it was embedded in the modem. -1 to AT&T.
Once we had the correct password, we were able to get everything working relatively quickly. The speed so far seems fine. +1 to AT&T.
I’m so grateful to finally have internet at home as I’ve been spending a lot of time going to the library, Starbucks and borrowing the neighbour’s wifi (with her permission but it’s been a patchy service). However, I’m cranky that it’s taken seven weeks since we moved into the new place to get to this point! -1 to AT&T.
That’s 17 negative points to AT&T and 11 positive points. That makes a net score of negative 6 and I think I was being generous! Hmmm….
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05.14.10
Posted in Arts & Culture, Media & Internet, Travel, Writing at 9.35 pm by Caitlin
We have been back in San Francisco for a week. My husband has started his new job and is liking it so far, apart from the mammoth commute. I’m discussing an interesting work opportunity myself, but it’s early days.
I’ve also started an advanced fiction writing workshop with Linda Watanabe McFerrin, who I first met at the Book Passage Travel Writing & Photography Conference last August. That’s once a week until the end of June with one-to-one work outside the group meetings as well. I’ve been trying to write a novel for some time and I’m hoping this could get me on track.
Meanwhile, I’m expecting to go to New York at the end of June for TBEX10, the Travel Blog Exchange conference. I’ve raised money through a site called Kickstarter, which is about funding creative projects by raising money from the public. A few face-to-face friends have contributed but mostly it’s been online friends – readers of my food and travel blog Roaming Tales and Twitter followers. I still need to book my airline ticket and arrange a hotel but I’m excited by the trip – it’ll let me meet a lot of fellow bloggers face to face, plus I’ll get to see friends in New York and hang out in the city for a few days.
I’ve updated my travel blog quite a bit lately, so please do check it out or become a fan on Facebook. This week’s posts have mostly been about Hearst Castle on the California Coast.
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05.09.10
Posted in Career, Media & Internet, Travel at 2.13 pm by Caitlin
I’ve been keeping my eye out for jobs but mostly been freelancing since moving to San Francisco. Here are a few of the things I’ve been up to on the work front.
LA Times | 2 May 2010: San Francisco: The rolling transit museum known as the F line
Travel article on San Francisco’s historic trams, which come from all around the world, including Melbourne.
Galavanting | 2 May 2010: Behind the Veil
Travel essay on spending a week living with an Iraqi family in Syria and my experience as a woman in this part of the world.
The Australian | 15 March 2010: Home invasion of 3D’s visual power
Feature for Media section on 3D television.
The Australian | 1 March 2010: Faceless no more – Facebook admits errors
Feature for Media section on Facebook’s response to cyber-vandalism of tribute sites for dead children.
New Statesman | 14 January 2010: Our friends electric
Article on renewable energy – wind, wave and tidal – in the Orkney Islands of Scotland. (I made a trip to Orkney to research this right before leaving Britain, in June 2009).
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09.06.09
Posted in Twitter at 11.42 am by Caitlin
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08.30.09
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08.23.09
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08.16.09
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08.09.09
Posted in Twitter at 11.42 am by Caitlin
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08.02.09
Posted in Twitter at 11.42 am by Caitlin
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Posted in Media & Internet, San Francisco at 2.58 am by Caitlin
It might be de rigeur to bitch about your internet provider but I want to take a moment to sing the praises of mine.
Getting internet connected was one of our first priorities when we moved into our new pad in San Francisco. Thanks to the wonders of Skype this also means we have a home phone. I asked around and it seemed that Comcast was the biggest provider but that many of its customers (or at least the vocal ones) were dissatisfied.
It was @aptinfrance on Twitter who tipped me off to the DSL Reports review site, which let me type in my zip code to see customer reviews for internet providers in my specific area.
I narrowed down the search and spoke to two different companies and eventually decided to go with the cable company Astound. They offer television and telephone as well but we just wanted broadband internet.
In Australia broadband internet costs the earth and comes with draconian download limits. In the UK, the price is not terrible but it’s normal to wait six to eight weeks for a connection, or to change providers, and ADSL is usually the only choice. By contrast, we have it pretty good in California, but I think Astound’s service has been above and beyond the usual.
The prices were competitive – it was a special offer and the price is guaranteed to remain the same for 12 months. We are paying $32 a month – $29 for the service and $3 for rental of the cable modem (we could buy our own if we wanted). This is the total cost as there’s no tax on internet here. It’s for the High Speed 10 plan, which is not their fastest but at 10Mbps download was faster than our previous ADSL connection in the UK.
Despite the price guarantee, we are not locked into a minimum contract so we can leave at any time. We expected to pay about $20 for the installation but we have not been charged for this on our first bill. I don’t know if we’ll end up being charged for it later, but as I’ve agreed to it, it’s fine either way.
I called on a Tuesday to get the prices and spoke to a woman called Megan. She sounded like she was local and was very helpful and pleasant. (this has been true of everyone I’ve dealt with at Astound). She talked me through the different plans. When I called back 10 minutes later to place my order, I spoke to the same person. She called me back 10 minutes later to set up an appointment for the installation. I opted for 2pm-5pm on Thursday – two days later.
I had a call the day before to confirm the appointment and then on the day, the engineer called half an hour early. When I said I was home, he asked if I would like him to come early since he was already in the area. I said yes.
It took him a little while to set things up as he needed to run a new connection from the street to the front of our house and then configure things with the modem in the house. He was probably there for 40 minutes all up, mostly outside. He remained entirely professional and courteous throughout and waited to check if the internet was working properly on my laptop before he left.
We had a customer service call a few days later just to check we were happy with everything so far. Of course we were.
After two weeks of smooth sailing, last night we got home to find our internet wasn’t working. We waited until this morning and it still wasn’t working. This evening we finally bit the bullet and called Astound. We placed the call at twenty minutes to six on a Saturday evening. They said they could have someone there by 8pm. The engineer showed up at 6.15pm!
It turned out that Comcast had been around the day before and disconnected us. (The engineer recognised the Astound cable with the Comcast terminator on the end). Presumably the previous tenants were with Comcast and they’d asked to be disconnected. The upstairs neighbours probably gave the technician access to the passageway while I was out. He didn’t think to check if it was actually a Comcast line or not and just disconnected it anyway.
The Astound guy got us back up and running within about 20 minutes. This meant it took under an hour for Astound to fix our internet, despite needing to send a technician to the property!
I don’t think I’ve ever written such a glowing review of ANY company before, let alone a utilities provider! Please note, I am just an anonymous customer and this review is unmotivated by anything other than complete satisfaction.
I am astounded!
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