My Cable Provider Is Less Than Desirable 0

Last night, I was upgrading my laptop from Ubuntu Karmic Koala to Lucid Lynx (don’t blame me for the names–blame Mark Shuttleworth).

After two hours, with 11 minutes to go in the download, the cable connection rolled over and played dead. I had to power down the router (that’s fancy talk for pull the power plug out), then power down the modem, reconnect the modem and wait for it to come back to life, then reconnect the router.

Fortunately for me, the download picked up where it left off.

This is not an isolated event.

My connection frequently rolls over and plays dead and I have to go through the disconnect-reconnect routine when I’m doing big downloads.

I do not do BitTorrent. I don’t even like BitTorrent.

I do not download music and movie files from illicit sites and I observe copyright, but I occasionally do big downloads–big legal downloads of free and open source Linux distributions, software upgrades, newsgroup posts, and the like. And this outfit regularly fails in the middle of them requiring me to disconnect-reconnect or, at worst, start all over and hope to get lucky.

It’s not me. I’ve been doing this stuff too long.

In five years of using Comcast, I did not encounter the problems I have encountered in five months of using this outfit.

My ISP advertises itself as “Your friend in the digital world.”

Yeah.

Right.