EU takes a dump on others. Net neutrality is law: no roaming charges

[Meresgi]

It's ok guys, you can always just switch to dial up.

Fuck it, i'm just going to steal my neighbors WiFi signal! 99% of them have either WEP or WPA2-WPS anyways so not like it's hard.

[Talint]

Net Neutrality is such a dumb term. That headline should really read "Court rules against Internet Freedoms and Rights". Then we'd burn the fucking country down.

I would genuinely like to see one other consumer who thinks this is a great ruling. I refuse to believe that they only sit on the court.

[Meresgi]

Shit will constantly happen in this country. We hatezor science and technology unless it's giving us iphones, and the people heading committees and panels on this shit have 0 clue wtf is going on, because they got their jobs back when the radio and microwave came out.

[Corrderio]

I'd love some Google Fiber despite trusting the company less and less each month. Verizon FIOS is good internet but a bad provider.

A bit off topic, but other than how botched the Google+/YT conversion was, what else are they doing bad at?

[arus2001]

If I had to guess, the general sentiment from people there seems to be Google isn't so much about making the net better for folks nowadays as it is making a buck. Though, I guess that's the eventual fate of anything successful the moment it does something someone doesn't like.

[Meresgi]

A bit off topic, but other than how botched the Google+/YT conversion was, what else are they doing bad at?

Harvesting every ounce of your data while "possibly" shaking hands with the NSA behind closed doors. There certainly are enough backdoors to gmail and the like.

[Komm Suesser Tod]

I know cable installers and technicians are the public face of the company, and the easiest to blame when shit goes wrong, but poorly trained is dead on. Moreover, even customers don't get treated as poorly as the people who work for the cable companies. Long hours in occasionally terribly dirty places, exposure to the full variety of elements, threats, berating and general abuse at the hands of customers and more, all for not very good pay or benefits. Customers are well within their rights to be upset at the treatment they receive from their providers, and should probably be more upset than they are, but please don't take in out on their lowest level employees.

[Corrderio]

Harvesting every ounce of your data while "possibly" shaking hands with the NSA behind closed doors. There certainly are enough backdoors to gmail and the like.

Oh right. I forgot about the NSA thing.

[djzombie]

http://www.thedailybeast.com/article...net-maybe.html

[Fhqwghads]

So angry. So very, very angry.

[Necronus]

I know cable installers and technicians are the public face of the company, and the easiest to blame when shit goes wrong, but poorly trained is dead on. Moreover, even customers don't get treated as poorly as the people who work for the cable companies. Long hours in occasionally terribly dirty places, exposure to the full variety of elements, threats, berating and general abuse at the hands of customers and more, all for not very good pay or benefits. Customers are well within their rights to be upset at the treatment they receive from their providers, and should probably be more upset than they are, but please don't take in out on their lowest level employees.

I never, ever give the installation guys any shit. I know that most of the problems aren't inherently their fault. I have two instances of situations which made me feel bad for those guys.

1. Had Comcast TV for a while, but the installation was horrid. The dude spent about 2 hours trying to get it to work until eventually he convinced a senior tech to come by with some extra equipment. As the time passed you could tell not only how frustrated he was, but he began getting depressed about his other installs that day who'd probably bitch at him for being late. It took an additional two hours for the two techs combined to eventually trace the fault to out of date wiring outside the Apt. complex, requiring them to put in a request to dig up the property to replace it.

2. Got FIOS at my new house and that's when I suddenly realized that the shitty South Park style customer support we get is actually GOOD compared to the support line the techs get. Basically what happened was the boxes outside (I'm in a condo, so it was an array of them) were not labelled at all, he had no way of telling which was mine. He called the tech support line they have and we literally sat there talking while he was on hold for a little over TWO HOURS while elevator music played over his phone. I don't think I've ever waited on hold that long without hanging up and giving up ... but its not like he has a choice.

Fuck Cable/Internet providers.

[Komm Suesser Tod]

I never, ever give the installation guys any shit. I know that most of the problems aren't inherently their fault. I have two instances of situations which made me feel bad for those guys.

1. Had Comcast TV for a while, but the installation was horrid. The dude spent about 2 hours trying to get it to work until eventually he convinced a senior tech to come by with some extra equipment. As the time passed you could tell not only how frustrated he was, but he began getting depressed about his other installs that day who'd probably bitch at him for being late. It took an additional two hours for the two techs combined to eventually trace the fault to out of date wiring outside the Apt. complex, requiring them to put in a request to dig up the property to replace it.

2. Got FIOS at my new house and that's when I suddenly realized that the shitty South Park style customer support we get is actually GOOD compared to the support line the techs get. Basically what happened was the boxes outside (I'm in a condo, so it was an array of them) were not labelled at all, he had no way of telling which was mine. He called the tech support line they have and we literally sat there talking while he was on hold for a little over TWO HOURS while elevator music played over his phone. I don't think I've ever waited on hold that long without hanging up and giving up ... but its not like he has a choice.

Fuck Cable/Internet providers.

Part of that is very much the ISP's problem, but some of that is the company that built the condo/apartments. Coax wiring is one place where they cheap out hardcore, figuring they'll never get blamed and nobody will make the choice of where to live based on internet/cable quality. One of my duties as a cable installer was to do availability audits, which entailed driving to an address and checking to see if it was able to be serviced and when I reported to one lady that it would likely take at least a year to get service to her new subdivision, she told me flat out that she was going to sell her brand new house and move.

Easily one of my favorite customers ever, and I never even saw her face to face. This stands in stark contrast to another job, exact same deal, go to an address, see if there's any junction boxes nearby. I get there, brand new subdivision, closest cable hardline is across a four lane street up on a pole, and since the new places only do underground and not poles, it would have to be burrowed under the street and brought up, which would take a while to set up, and with how new it is, I couldn't give her any estimate on when it would be set up. The lady lost it, started going off on me how it was unacceptable that I couldn't even give her an estimate, and asked to speak to my supervisor. So I called him, put him on speaker and explained the situation, he explains (which I already knew) that it was handled by another division that scheduled hard line expansion without any outside input and we couldn't give out the number. That pushed this woman over the edge, just yelling and screaming about how useless we were and that I shouldn't expect her to be our customer any time soon.

Upper class white people were easily my least favorite customers. They never listened to what the techs said, the people actually doing the work, and would always go with what the person on the phone said, who knew literally nothing about the products or services they were selling and worked on sales quotas, promising customers the moon and leaving us with the unenviable task of delivering the truth to people. The only trickle down I've ever seen is shit rolling down hill.

[Meresgi]

http://www.wirelessweek.com/news/201...-away%E2%80%9D

McAdam has recently denounced unlimited, telling a different investor conference audience that physics bars the practice from being sustainable. Both Sprint and T-Mobile, a distant third and fourth behind Verizon and AT&T, offer unlimited data plans.

[Serra]

I agree. It's physically impossible to build a house out of money if they don't charge consumers for the amount of data they use.

[Ksandra]

rofl that makes me laugh. I have T-Mobile and while yes, definitely some of their business practices are because they are behind, their decisions are a big, "fuck you" to other cellphone companies. Now they have joined the ranks of the few other small carriers getting into the banking business which says "fuck you" to the banks.


God I love T-Mo.

[Surealistic]

cant always blame the installers, but then again, you can sometimes, i was having directv installed, was told on the phone there would be no install fees or anything. guy shows up, tells me i need a pole to stand the dish on and it will cost me $100, i didnt have it, was pissed, waited a couple weeks when i had the extra money, called them back, and suprise, there was supposed to be no fee for the pole, and they would be sending someone out right away, guy got there, KNOWING EXACTLY WHAT HE NEEDED, didnt have what he needed, told ME to go buy some cables that he needed

needless to say i never got directv installed

[Waraji]

Such is the case with Private Contractor Installers.

[djzombie]

God I love T-Mo.

Didn't they stop subsidizing the price of phones now so to get a phone with them, even with a contract, you have to pay full retail?

[Ksandra]

Didn't they stop subsidizing the price of phones now so to get a phone with them, even with a contract, you have to pay full retail?

You pay full price but the plans are cheaper to compensate, making it so depending on the phone you get you can save money or spend more (though even spending more, really is going to be cheaper than Verizon and AT&T). You can also do a payment plan with the phone which basically makes it like a regular contract (ie. can't leave t-mo until the phone is paid off).

To put it in retrospect:

When my daughter broke my phone, I bought the nokia lumia for $350 I think outright (this was before the change but my upgrade wasn't up). My husband and my plan is now $40 a month cheaper than it was before. This means that in 9~ months the phone would have been paid with the regular plan. We can then keep saving money, or let him take a turn and upgrade.

At a glance, it looks like the top phones are going for $28 a month for two years atm. Still adding that to a t-mo plan is going to be cheaper than a Verizon contract plan.

[Meresgi]

T-Mo is a great way to go. After going to Verizon/Sprint stores to look for a phone for my wife. The price of everything over the fucking plan was terrible. I just shelled out the $300+ on a Nexus 8gig and signed her up with Tmobile. She had shitty service when we were living in our old place, but service now is completely fine. She pays I think $30ish a month and never gets close to her data cap, and we use our cellphones are out home phones now.

Fuck verizon, the only verizon service I wish I had was their fios because comcast service is even fucking worse. But Verizon fios costs too fucking much anyways.