@timbray Google/Alphabet watered down their brand and lost my trust as a consumer years ago; when they had 7 chat apps and forced you to change apps every three weeks.

All three of the Pixels I bought for my family failed the same way, but only when the warranty expired.

@timbray Astound acquired my local ISP and ran it into the ground. Left after days of outages with no ETA. No one could give me a straight answer, even their NOC.

Did not know it was PE owned, that makes so much sense.

@timbray right now I have 2/3 fiber to the home including GFiber (in the ground) and quantum (now AT&T) (telephone poles) the other is Metronet (now T-mobile Fiber, also telephone poles). Stills have a cable company servicing the area (again telephone poles).

But this doesn’t bode well for my primary and fail over.

😮‍💨

@timbray Not surprised. The article notes his earliest experience with Astound was being an RCN customer in NYC. I'm in NYC and still have 'RCN from Astound' and it's gone to shit over the last few years. I've had multiple promises from their reps about the cost of the connection not going up for X months turn into total lies.

I'd switch to Verizon FIOS now that it's FINALLY available in my apt building, but they only seem to offer deals if you also switch your phone service to them too.

@timbray During my career, the company I worked for went through two “mergers”. Can’t help appreciating your sentence “decisions to get into new markets are a map of some mediocre executive’s ambition” ! Calling them mediocre is very gentle, by the way :-)

I’ll also remember this: “Polish the turd before you sell it.” Made me chuckle…