Up To… As Much As

The biggest annoyance to all of my Internet provider nonsense is the idea that I am paying for speeds of “up to” 800 MB/s. The problem is that I speedtest it, and have not gotten more than 75. When I called them on it, I got the “we promise as much as 800, but the time of day and conditions sometimes affect your speeds.”

Here is the thing: I only work 3 days a week. When I do work, I work a 12 hour day. I get home at midnight, one in the morning, sometimes (when I work the 15-03 shift) I don’t get home until 4 am. What all of that means is that I speed test all hours of the day or night, on many different days of the week.

This reminds me of the days when cell phone providers did the same thing. I was a customer of Sprint back when they were Nextel. My relationship with that company ended with me filing a lawsuit when I cancelled service after my phone service failed after 2004’s Hurricane Charley. I wanted to cancel my service because the number of missed and dropped calls was ridiculous. They claimed that they didn’t guarantee cell service in any particular location or at any particular time. As long as their phone service worked somewhere and sometimes, they were fulfilling their end of the deal. They told me that either I could stay with them or pay the $600 cancellation fee.

I paid the fee to avoid the hit to my credit and then sued them. I won the lawsuit, and was refunded my fees plus some additional my time and trouble. I remained on the Sprint shit list for over a decade.