"On my dial up accelerator, I can talk and surf at the same time, right?" Oh, boy!

[sld72382]

Back in 2000 cable internet was not available in my old apartment building (I was living in NY at the time). Which was odd as many surrounding areas was able to get it. DSL was out of the question as the building's phone lines were too old.

Then one day Cablevision had a section on its website where you could check if your street had cable internet. Well one day my street was on the "not available" list and the day after it was "available." So of course I hurry down to The Wiz (remember them?) and sign up. I ask the rep what took so long (almost a year on the waiting list). She said "each area has 'nodes' that have to be turned on and your area just took longer to get it's 'node' turned on."

My BS meter went off, and later on I asked a Cablevision tech why the heck would they wait almost a year to turn on a stupid 'node.' According to him, the 'node' part is true but the reason why it took so long is because I lived in a town with a (very much) primarily hasidic jewish population and for those that don't know, hasidic jews don't believe in TVs and thus don't own them. So the cable company didn't think it would be profitable to work to put cable internet in a place where most wouldn't be getting it. That is until the non-hasidic residents starting complaining "Hey, they're not the only people in this town!"

[greensinestro]

According to him, the 'node' part is true but the reason why it took so long is because I lived in a town with a (very much) primarily hasidic jewish population and for those that don't know, hasidic jews don't believe in TVs and thus don't own them. So the cable company didn't think it would be profitable to work to put cable internet in a place where most wouldn't be getting it. That is until the non-hasidic residents starting complaining "Hey, they're not the only people in this town!"

Complaining is all the non-Hasidic Jews did? Isn't some sort of a lawsuit in order, or at least something that nails companies like this to the wall? In South Florida, Bellsouth was nice enough to lay down DSL facilities at retirement communities such as Century Village, even though over ninety percent of the customers there have no interest in owning a computer and could care less about buying luxuries. Regardless of that, facilities are there for the miniscule amount of people who do want it.

[DannyboyO1]

That's not very good BS. Although we did have a similar situation around my neck of the woods... but in our case, it was "you're just a bit too far from the repeater." Which we could believe, it's a very sparsely populated county block... on this side of the street. And the house is quite far from the road. Other side of the block has people, other side of the street has some.

Occurs to me now, we've personally probably paid for the equipment twice over in the last four years.

Ah well. Been reading a lot about management of late... and coming to the conclusion that most companies are run badly, and it's only truly boneheaded errors that cause them to die.