Tuesday, October 31, 2006

One Cable Company Under God

Posted By on Tue, Oct 31, 2006 at 3:52 PM

If we have one thing to be thankful today, it's that we don't live in Los Angeles.

Why? Because from Newport Beach to Malibu (including all those less plush zip codes in between), anyone who uses high-speed cable for Internet service was screwed from 6 a.m. until a little after noon. Six long busy morning hours without Internet access. That area is covered by one cable company. Isn't there some law against monopolies?

Time Warner Cable ate up Comcast and Adelphia to become one giant eat-my-dust cable company. That's scary.

Here, you don't exactly have a choice of cable companies. I live under Cox coverage but chose to go with Qwest DSL. I'm not sure why. I needed a separate IP address for my one-woman-owned business and didn't want a business account. Qwest said it was not a problem, but it turned out it was quite the problem. Now that I have it, I don't want to start again with another headache. If Comcast could've handled it better, it wouldn't be available to me anyway based on my geography.

I just did a search (as of 2 p.m.) for information about the Time Warner Cable outage in Los Angeles, and nothing shows up on the Los Angeles Times, Yahoo! (large office located in Pasadena) and Google. However, there were plenty of other past outages listed.