{"id":452,"date":"2005-02-05T14:00:43","date_gmt":"2005-02-05T21:00:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stefangeens.com\/?p=452"},"modified":"2005-02-05T14:00:43","modified_gmt":"2005-02-05T21:00:43","slug":"upc-useless-piece-of-cable","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/2005\/02\/upc-useless-piece-of-cable\/","title":{"rendered":"UPC: Useless Piece of Cable"},"content":{"rendered":"

Rant. You have been warned. This post is a wholly optional read.<\/span>Having just moved into my seventh apartment in the two-and-a-half years I’ve been in Stockholm, I have been witness to several different solutions to providing broadband to Stockholmers. Most of the apartments I’ve lived in have an ethernet jack built right into the wall, providing a seamless and quite blazing 10mbps, or even higher, much like in a modern office. In a few other cases, I’ve had the misfortune of needing to rely on broadband via cable provider UPC.<\/p>\n

If I had a choice, I’d not be using them at all. But they are the sole cable provider in my building, and in the building I lived in until last week, and in fact in most of central Stockholm. This is a wonderfully incumbent position to be in; in fact, why not abuse it? And so they did last month, deciding to take away my beloved BBC<\/a> [PDF] from the basic cable package. Want it back? Please pay more.<\/p>\n

This product downgrade was met with apparent resignation by UPC customers, as if they perfectly understand that a monopoly position naturally engenders a diminuition of service. But it bugs me. Strike one.<\/p>\n

I ordered internet access from UPC well in advance of moving into my new place, not wanting to suffer a gap in connectivity. But by the day I moved in, there was still no sign of the cable modem they had promised to send me. So I went to a shop and got one myself, plugged it in and had my broadband. For 6 hours. Then it went down. That was on Monday evening.<\/p>\n

I called them right away. Unfortunately, although their service goes down at all hours, their phone support is only up during business hours. The first person I talked to, on Tuesday, told me to wait a day to see if it went back up all by itself. Strike two. The second person, on Wednesday, eventually convinced himself there was a problem with their service, and promised to send someone. “In the next five days.” WTF??<\/p>\n

Had I been able to speak my mind, I would have told them to stuff the six month contract I had been forced to sign with them and that I would take my business elsewhere. But there is no elsewhere. DSL really doesn’t sate my broadband appetite anymoreUPC’s cheapest “broadband” is 128mbps for $23 a month. I’m paying $57 a month for 4mbps. <\/span>.<\/p>\n

Well, now it’s Saturday. They don’t work on weekends, not even for emergency repairs to their network, so it will be Monday at the earliest, if<\/em> they solve the problem, before I am wired again. I don’t blog at work, so here is the reason why this site has not been fed the past week.<\/p>\n

Instead, I have been relying on the quite excellent Il Caf\u00e9, a real Italian caf\u00e9 in the heart of KungsholmenJust off the corner of Scheelegatan and Bergsgatan<\/span> that also has an Airport installed on the wall, with free broadband to all comers. It’s a brilliant investment on their part — the extra business they generate from laptoppers in a single day should foot their monthly broadband bill. I’ve dropped by there twice a day this week to pick up my email — the barista probably thinks I’m stalking her.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Rant. You have been warned. This post is a wholly optional read.Having just moved into my seventh apartment in the two-and-a-half years I’ve been in Stockholm, I have been witness to several different solutions to providing broadband to Stockholmers. Most … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-452","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-personal"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7eNhC-7i","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/452","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=452"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/452\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=452"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=452"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stefangeens.com\/2001-2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=452"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}