For the past 3-4 weeks our upload speeds have been dropping to zero or very close to 0. It’s usually in the evening but not always. We were notified of an outage the first week and then the outage notification disappeared. Finally found out from a neighbor a week in that we have a bad node in our neighborhood that was being replaced and he was told by the end of the week. I let that date come and go and then put in a ticket myself, it behaved for two days in a row so I cancelled as it would have meant taking time off work and sure enough that night it dropped out again.
I contacted an agent was told this was being done by the maintenance department and it could take several weeks as it’s a large job. Working in IT I understand things happen and services can be lost. My biggest complaint with this whole ordeal is that I can’t get an estimated completion date as “that’s another department and I don’t have access to that” and if this was maintenance why wasn’t I told about this? Communication, communication, communication!!! If I took down a service for weeks on end, or something failed, and I didn’t notify the users of the outage and an ETA I would be updating my resume as I would no longer be employed. Especially if I claimed ignorance and just blamed another department (even if it is their fault).
I know most of the world has gone back to normal, but my kids are still taking classes online because of health issues. They just started new classes the week before this started and now we are out $90 so far in missed classes we can’t get refunded on. We can sometimes get mobile data to work and tether their computers, but our mobile service is unreliable where we are, and we have racked up 20GB of mobile data so far this month doing this. After 16+ years of usually reliable, but very overpriced, service with Mediacom I’m at my breaking point for the way myself and my neighbors have been treated. Mediacom no longer has a monopoly in my area and the competition, though not as fast, is starting to look very attractive, especially as they are MUCH cheaper than Mediacom. Again, my main issue with this has been a severe lack of communication and not knowing what is going on. Meanwhile my wife is having to apologize to another teacher for my daughter dropping offline halfway through a class tonight as we lost upload again tonight in the middle of another class. Usually, an internet issue is just an annoying loss of entertainment for a family, but for us it’s how our kids get their education, how we access medical care, and how I do my required training for my job.
We’ve been told we would be refunded for the time we are having I issues, but I doubt it as that never happens and it will leave my wondering why I’m paying $140/month to a company that can’t even bother communicating with long time customers to let us know we will have no service, or that something isn’t going well and service will be impacted for the next few weeks.
I’m posting this here in the hopes that this will be read by someone who actually cares and can be a learning opportunity for someone.
