It's The Network

Yeah, Verizon sucks.

At work and at Angel's, we have Verizon DSL. While it works nicely when it's chugging along like it's supposed to, the times when it refuses to do so are quite the pain in the ass. These past two months have been like riding a bandwidth rollercoaster, but one with sudden, neck-wrenching stops at random intervals.

For the first month or so, service was incredibly sluggish, especially at work. Pages that, on even a basic DSL connection, should only take a second or three to load ended up taking fifteen or more. Less image-heavy pages like this blog, which load almost instantly, took just as long as any other page during the slowdown.

Recently, though, there have been more and more instances of the modem's Internet light either beaming a bright shade of red, or not being on at all. Those, my friends, are the fun times, and they explain my lack of posts the last two days. I knew I should have typed something up while I was at the Avenue working, damnit.

With the outages come other problems as well. Every chance I've had to edit the video from my 30th birthday party has been foiled by Verizon's crap service, lagging connections to codec servers to the point of time-out (they don't try for very long before declaring a time-out, either), if not disallowing me before I even sit down thanks to the Red Light of Death. There's some cool stuff in those vids, since it was just the crew there that night, and we had free reign over the joint. Plus, there's some footage of Andy, Fred and I doing some acoustic stuff, which is awesome.

The first recording of Tetsaiga. Rock on!

But all this is being cockblocked by The Network. It was bad enough when it was Bell Atlantic, back before the takeover and before DSL was available here in the sticks. Phone lines didn't have much latency, so already-slow connections were further choked down.

And yet they still charge an arm and at least a good portion of a leg for their service. Good lord, I hope FiOS isn't this bad...