My Busted TV, Part 2: Crappy Internet Sucks

As we moved into our first full day without a regular TV set in the house, my boyfriend and I learned an awful lesson: If you have a crappy ISP, then streaming video on line to replace your traditional TV viewing becomes hard, if not impossible.

Our condo association provides high-speed internet to all residents in the building as part of our assessments, which is pretty nice. The problem is that they decided to go with some ISP called American Wireless Broadband (or something just as generic sounding) which serves broadband via satellite. I know many people find satellite broadband to be a good option, mainly because where they live, satellite is the only option. I live in Chicago. We have options.

As it turns out, our ISP places an undetermined, varying bandwidth cap on our usage. In their discretion, if they feel like we use to much Internets, they throttle us or shut us off completely. Without warning. When we first moved in, we experienced being shut off, but after an absolutely pleasant discussion with our rep (pleasant for us... not sure so much for the poor guy who answered the phone) at the ISP, we were back up and running without a hitch, and we hadn't experienced a problem since. However, now that we are streaming show after show on line on one computer, and I'm usually playing Warhammer or some other MMO at the same time on another, and usually have my work laptop set up and on line for emergencies, our bandwidth consumption has gone up, and our ISP has decided that is unacceptable. Thus, we've been throttled. Again.

Last night, we were struggling through a couple episodes and I got disconnected from Warhammer servers multiple times. At the height of our frustration, we contacted the ISP for answers, only to find out that they only have customer service reps there until 7pm Eastern (we live in a Central Time zone...) and tech support there until 5pm. Another moment of rage ensued, and talk of organizing a mob to find the cursed satellite dishes, and we came up with a solution. We don't "pay" for our current ISP, per se. They are part of our assessments, so we technically do, but that's a fixed cost anyway, so we can't do much about that, but we can still pay for our own ISP if we want to.

Ten minutes after that revelation we had scheduled a set up time for AT&T to install broadband at our condo. While I do know that AT&T may not be the most darling ISP in the world, our only other real option was Comcast, which is utter fail. And U-Verse is starting to roll out here in Chicago, so by mid next year, we may even be able to upgrade to that.

So lesson for the day, kittens: If you decide to forego your traditional TV for streaming content on line, make sure your ISP doesn't blow.