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I had 3 great years of internet in San Francisco with Comcast. It basically was like those utilities: it was always there, around the promised speeds, with 0 outages that I noticed. Considering I work from home, and do all my codework over ssh, I could tell if there was a slowdown for even a few seconds.

Then at year 4, for whatever reason, it started to have issues. At least once per month.

How I miss those 3 blissful years when it Just Worked.

My experience in a suburban area is relatively similar. I wouldn't be surprised if what it really came down to was that people started streaming video from Netflix, Hulu etc... and simply put, the cable companies have less than zero incentive to optimize that experience.

Comparing Title II utilities to water and electricity is silly. How happy are you with your landline telephone and cable TV services? You know, the ones that everyone hates and is replacing with internet-carried alternatives?

My landline telephone is very satisfactory. I've never encountered any service disruptions with it. In fact, I can't think of a single time in my entire life where I've picked up the phone and not had a usable dialtone on the other end, or where I've placed a call (to another landline) and received a bad connection.

The single time I had a problem with how it was billed, I called the state regulator who worked with my telco to sort out how taxes were being calculated. It turned out that they were billing me correctly, but couldn't explain it over the phone.

How are your download speeds over that landline phone? There's a difference between meeting a minimal level of service and actually delivering innovation, such as speed increases. How do you like your high definition phone calls? You don't have that yet? Crazy. I would thought the phone company would be trying to rush that out the door so as to be more competitive against all of the phone company competition out there.

I have never been on a phone call that felt more "high definition" than two landlines connected together unmediated by any voip or cellular link.

My problem with my landline is price ($35/mo to start) and features (practically non-existent, with huge premiums charged for useful things). The service effectively hasn't changed since the 1980s, while the prices have steadily risen.

I replaced my landline with an Ooma (a VOIP phone which let me port my old landline number) which sounds WORLDS better, lets me manage personal blocklists, aggregates community blocklists to automatically filter incoming calls from telemarketers, political parties, etc, sends voicemails to my email, integrates with Google Voice, can ring on multiple phones or devices, and other such things. It's in a completely different class of service, and it costs a fraction of what my competing local offerings do.

> It's in a completely different class of service, and it costs a fraction of what my competing local offerings do.

However, your VOIP will not work during a power outage, during an internet outage, or any other time the VOIP company's servers are down.

Landlines work during power outages, during internet outages, and they provide around 5 nines of uptime (that's less than 6 minutes of downtime a year).

Those are the things your $35 a month buys you. How important that reliability is to you generally depends on your health. I know more than a few folks who would never give up their landline, because they have medical conditions which depend on reliable access to 911.

The landline option I had previously was serviced by my cable company. If my internet was out, so was my landline, despite it not being VOIP. At my previous residence, it was serviced by the local phone company, and ran through a multiplexing box which plugged into my house power. Both that option and my cable modem have battery backups which continue to function in a power outage, but once that's gone, no more service.

That leaves only VOIP provider outages as a concern, and I've yet to experience one of those in a few years.

I agree that it's a silly comparison; you should take that up with the post I replied to, which explicitly mentioned water and power and seemed to imply that my internet service would degrade to the same quality as those utilities (if only!)

When I had a landline telephone, I was completely happy with it. It was inexpensive and reliable, and if I was unsatisfied with my service I could choose from several other providers. I could use my own equipment with it, all of the consumer electronics were interoperable with any service provider, and I never had an outage (to my knowledge; I didn't get a lot of phone calls). I had a wide variety of options for dialup internet at the time, either through my phone provider or other competing providers. This was in a small town in northern Idaho, too, and it wasn't exactly known as a telecommunications hub or city of industry.

I am unhappy with my cable TV service, which is provided by the same company as my cable internet service. My cable provider is the only one in my area, and has no incentive to do anything other than take slightly more of my money every year in exchange for performing zero upgrades or service improvements.

This is just a single data point, but only one of the two companies I mention above is subject to Title II regulation currently, and it's coincidentally the one that I had a good experience with.

I don't know of anyone that has ever experienced any kind of technical problem with their landline telephone or cable TV services. Rather, you pretty much need a cell phone and (to a much lesser extent) a home internet connection to participate in society today, and the marginal utility from having a separate home line or a cable TV service in addition to those services is not enough to justify the cost for most people.

Why would a lack of service by an internet provider be comparable to a utility pumping sewage?

Shouldn't you be looking at water restrictions which the utilities blame on drought? This is the most similar type of event to the Comcast outage which you are describing. Both could have been prevented through better planning, capital expenditures, and forethought. If this is the comparison, both Comcast and many water providers fail, though the internet providers have gradually improving products, while the utilities do not (as far as I know). Most industries' products do not fall from the sky, yet they still manage to provide an adequate supply.

>Why would a lack of service by an internet provider be comparable to a utility pumping sewage?

I work partly from home and, while not quite "utility pumping sewage" level of crisis, a badly-timed internet blackout at my apartment can be a serious problem for the whole team.

I agree entirely, it is comparable to a power outage (, which happens quite often both at my residence and place of work).

Do you live in a jungle or something? Everywhere I've ever lived, including California during the Enron scandal, power outages were an order of magnitude less common than (non-power-outage-related) internet outages.

My power outages here in Austin seem to be around a couple per year. I think my Internet outages (outside of those resulting from me not having power) are less frequent, though I don't have logs checking.

Now, my Internet being slow...that's not uncommon at all. I've also had them randomly charge me an extra $50 "by mistake", as well directly and repeatedly lying to me about what services/packages are available.

I'm in central Austin, and so ready for Google Fiber. My parents live out in the middle of nowhere, and Internet outages are quite common for them, easily exceeding power outages.

In Santa Clara County, at my home with Sonic.net Legacy DSL (AT&T DSLAM + ATM/Sonic.net IP), in the past 10 years, I can only recall two internet outages. In one, the telephone was out as well (a fiber cut between the remote terminal and the central office), the most recent one started around the same time as a 30 minute power outage.

In contrast, I've had several 30 minute to 2 hour power outages, and lots of power outages lasting less than a minute.

On the other hand, a short internet outage would not necessarily be noticed, because there's not a big change in ambient noise when the internet fails, nor do i have to reset the time on my appliances.

How about an internet provider injecting tracking scripts and advertisements into HTTP responses; an internet provider failing to respond correctly to DNS requests (so they can provide their own search engine on mistyped domains)? Both of these things have been done by ISPs - and recently.

I'd consider that comparable to a utility pumping sewage.

I'd consider that equivalent to a utility not chlorinating the supply, or having sediment issues; both are unexpected and undesired behaviors which can be corrected.

I do not understand the desire to compare problematic internet service to sewage-pumping through the potable water supply. Are you desperate for superlatives which will make the internet service providers look bad?

Do you understand what happens when DNS returns false negatives? It causes tons of shit to break. It's not a little bit of sediment. Maybe not sewage level catastrophe .. maybe "your water supply is contaminated for the foreseeable future. You can't drink it, not even boiling it will help, but you can continue to wash your clothes in it."

I love how the upvote system encourages pedantry.

It's clear that Parent is saying "Comcast delivers shitty service" -> "water utility delivers shitty water".

It's a (possibly unintentional) pun, and I'm quite certain that Parent was able to get their point across regardless of technical inconsistencies.

But don't let that stop you in your quest to nitpick on the internet.

First off, that's not a pun; though it may qualify as some sort of base humor.

I'm not nitpicking, I just think the comparison doesn't make any sense unless one is trying to make Comcast out to be some sort of villain spewing sewage through everyone's taps. An internet outage is rightfully characterized as similar to a power outage or drought. The latter two are caused by poor planning and capital investments by power utilities, and the former is caused by similar behavior by the ISP. Both are fairly common.

> My tap water is clean

Define "clean". It may be sanitary but most tap water in the US tastes (and smells) like swimming pool and has tons of other trace amounts of harmful substances in it like benzene, pesticides, styrene, trichloroethylene, pharmaceuticals, etc:

http://water.epa.gov/drink/contaminants/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drinking_water_quality_in_the_...

If you want "clean" water you need water from an aquifer (like Fiji) or water that goes through a reverse osmosis treatment process. Even then it's not going to be perfectly clean, but it'll be a hell of a lot better than the vast majority of tap water out there.

What the heck are you talking about?

Those two links seem to contradict your point that tap water isn't "clean" since they point out that it is, in fact, very clean.

I come from a country where that is not the case and water had to be boiled before you could consume it. Oh yeah, and it wasn't fluoridated so I had multiple teeth rot away before I was 10 years old (luckily I moved to Canada before most of my adult teeth really started growing).

I'm also really curious where you get your water since most bottled water comes from "municipal sources" (i.e. it's tap water).

>Those two links seem to contradict your point that tap water isn't "clean" since they point out that it is, in fact, very clean.

If you actually read the links you would see that "clean" is simply defined by the EPA as "what we allow by law". And that there are many chemicals known to be harmful to humans that aren't regulated or monitored at all... not to mention the fact that tap water in many towns and cities across the US regularly has chemical levels that exceed the EPA's defined limits (and many scientists argue that these limits are too high as it is).

Here's another link: http://www.nrdc.org/water/drinking/uscities.asp

>I'm also really curious where you get your water since most bottled water comes from "municipal sources" (i.e. it's tap water).

There are several dispensers in my area that provide reverse osmosis (plus carbon) filtered water (water source is usually local tap water) and it costs about 25 cents a gallon or a dollar for 5 gallons. Most Walmarts have one, back by the beverage section.

It's also pretty easy to find inexpensive bottled water that's RO filtered, you just need to look on the bottle and it'll tell you where the water is from and how it is processed/filtered, if at all.

>Oh yeah, and it wasn't fluoridated so I had multiple teeth rot away before I was 10 years old (luckily I moved to Canada before most of my adult teeth really started growing).

Correlation does not equal causation.