*IDEAorange

This is the story of try­ing to get high speed inter­net access where i live in philadelphia.

Let’s start with Ver­i­zon.
Call them up. Give them the address. Can’t find the address in their data­base. Hmmm. We’d like to see if we can get FIOS. Wait­ing on hold. Time passes. The rep can’t find our address. Three peo­ple have lived there before us. Still can’t find our address.

Ok so no Ver­i­zon. If they don’t even know our address that spells bad news for the whole process.

Try Com­cast. (I can’t stand Com­cast. I don’t like their iden­tity, I don’t like their new build­ing, I don’t like that they got a huge tax break to build it. I don’t like their cul­ture.) But, I need high speed inter­net ser­vice. No tele­vi­sion, just internet.

Ok, they know our address. They’ll have some­one out to install tomor­row at 11 am. They’ll bill us. Excellent.

We’re mov­ing and our inter­net ser­vice will be up and run­ning before we move in. This is ter­rific. While unpack­ing we can work from home. Cross that off the list.

Ok, I’m pack­ing and my part­ner is at the new loca­tion to talk to the painters and wait for the Com­cast guy/woman. Believe it or not the guy shows up on time. Ok, lets hook ya up he says.

Bad news.

Cable isn’t run to our new abode. It’s out on the pole but they can’t run it from the pole. New con­struc­tion has to run it under­ground and it’s in our court­yard some­where. His­tory is that Com­cast have been out five other times to try to hook up cable. Some­how our cable has been paved over. We could pay to dig and find it. I don’t think so. We rent.

Now what to do? How can this be. This is Amer­ica we have tele­com com­pe­ti­tion that’s bet­ter for cus­tomers. We get choice.

I won’t rant on how I think tele­com is a pub­lic util­ity. But what am I to think when no one really wants to make an effort to give me service?

I call CTO Phil. Mr. Ives­Dig­i­tal.
He says EVDO.

Hmmm, this is a very inter­est­ing alter­na­tive. This means I can take my net­work con­nect to places that don’t have free wire­less inter­net. This is a REALLY GOOD idea.

Now I can stop freak­ing out.

Mar­garet goes to the Ver­i­zon store. She gets an EVDO card, she buys a plan and she heads to the office. We install the soft­ware and plug in the card. We put in the password.

We’re on the net!

Shar­ing my air­port network.