The Crappening

Or, how AT&T is making America great again

<rant>

A tree fell down yesterday afternoon just uphill from my house. I was outside at the time. I heard the tree fall and saw the phone line shaking (the power lines shook too, but they were disconnected recently during PG&E’s undergrounding project). The tree hit the phone line, and my phone and internet service went down. I called AT&T and they said the earliest they could send someone out to fix it is December 12, i.e. about 2.5 weeks from today.

I have a cell phone, and I can USB-tether it to the laptop, thanks to GrapheneOS’s elimination of the stupid carrier restrictions on tethering. But I don’t normally use the cell phone in my daily life (it’s off 99% of the time), and it has a very limited data plan, so I’d use it all up after a couple of videos. There are no other internet providers here, except for sketchy wireless systems that won’t work in this deep, tree-filled canyon.

So I’ll be without internet for a while, except for occasional trips to the library ten miles down I-80 from here to get anything important done if necessary. No Substack or Chopin videos until next month.

I’m pretty sure if I lived in Mexico or India, things would be better. AT&T U-verse, when it’s actually working, is just about the slowest internet service around nowadays, except for the old satellite systems and DSL. Even in rural Vermont things were 100 times better because we had a locally operated fiber internet/phone company that knew instantly when one of their fiber lines broke, and would have it fixed in a day. When I was in Mexico a year ago, the fiber internet service there was many times faster than U-verse. And the little town of Patagonia, AZ, which I visited in February, and which is out in the boondocks far away from any major city, has fiber internet now.

I assume this crappening exists because AT&T really wants everybody to be on wireless instead of physical cables, and because they are trying to “maximize shareholder value”, which means “minimize customer satisfaction”. They have a fiber cable running through this area less than a half mile from my house, but of course they’ll never actually bring fiber to the home. Instead they’ll use the fiber to install 5G crap on poles every couple of hundred yards, at which point they’ll probably remove the copper lines running to my house.

</rant>