They say you get what you pay for. So when Comcast gives you something for free — say, a router for your wireless network — you probably shouldn’t expect much from it.
In my case, the router in question lasted not quite six months. It failed a few days ago, which is why I’ve been offline. Now I have a new one that I paid for, and The Son installed it for me this afternoon.
Comcast, it seems, no longer gives away free routers. I wonder why? Could it be they got tired of handling calls from all those customers having router problems? Not only that, they now have Signature Service for their customers. As nearly as I could tell, that means you get some really lame tech support when you call — they check to make sure their signal is getting to your house. Beyond that, to troubleshoot the router or help you get a new one hooked up, they refer you to their spiffy new superduper Signature Service which may treat you with kid gloves if you stay on the line, but they’ll charge you for it.
Isn’t that great? They charge you an arm and a leg for cable and Internet, bumping the rates up every chance they get. And now they charge for anything resembling telephone tech support.
Sorry, end of rant. Anyway, that’s why I haven’t been around for a few days. I hope the new router lasts longer than six months. It should. If freebies last six months, a $50 one should be good for at least a couple of years, shouldn’t it?
Good grief, these guys really take the cake – and everything else their legal monopolies make available to them. But I am glad you’re back up and blogging, for now at least…
Yeah, they’ll take the cake and anything else they can get their hands on. Apparently their tech support now is free if it’s on their side of the modem. Once it’s inside your house, it becomes Signature Service. I’m just glad I had an option not to use it.
Well…… my router, which I bought when I had Comcast installed, crapped out on me in about 6 months. But, all my geek friends have had theirs working fine for much longer than that. So I may have bought a lemon. I still have the new one in the box since my desktop is ethernet. Haven’t bothered to install it yet, but will when I feel the need to pull out my Ubuntu laptop… which I will need to do soon. Sorry… rambling… 🙂
Well, I did rewire around the dead router so I had Internet access on my desktop, but it’s stuck back in a back room, away from the TV, sofa, kitchen, etc. and I’m just too spoiled rotten to go back there to “play.” But it was available for “emergency use” like printing out a Zappo’s return label and checking email once a day.
The best things in life are free, but you can keep ’em for the the birds and bees…
Although what the birds and bees would want with a router I cannot imagine.
I haven’t needed a router, until last month when I discovered Santa was going to bring me an iPad. I had been downloading for my kindle by wire from the computer. So I went to Walmart and bought a Belkin for about $40. It’s working fine now. Should have done it much sooner.
I’ve always had good luck with Belkin products. The two routers that failed on me this year were NetGears. Lesson learned. My new one is a MediaLink, very popular and highly rated on Amazon, which was enough to convince me. I’m not knowledgeable enough to disagree with more than 1,000 people.