My Broadband Valentine

There I was, waiting for the Time Warner service truck to arrive for the second time this month - this time because the signal keeps magically fritzing out all of a sudden right in the middle of an crucial download or insightful blog post. I had come to expect this, I guess. You reach a certain age when you make bargains, and you come to terms with what you can reasonably tolerate.

But when the bell rang it wasn't Time Warner.

It was Josh.

Josh works for Current/Cinergy - a new broadband provider in competition with Time Warner Cincinnati and Cincinnati Bell Zoomtown. He started talking provocatively about how he could offer me speeds of one megabit consistently through the power wires in my house, without a lot of extra hassle. I knew I shouldn't listen, but the first thirty days were free, and the monthly rate was a good $15 bucks cheaper a month. So agreed to the trial.

Price point might turn a few heads, but the real test comes with reliability. Power can be fickle, especially in this older house with 110 wiring. When the six year old decides to microwave a Ken doll in the next room will my browser get slower? Will the actual performance vary during times of the day, or during peak electricity season when the A/C units are humming up and down Spacetropic Avenue?

Time Warner eventually showed up and fixed my service (for now) but it remains to be seen if the will ever make me a better deal. It's a competitive market here in the Queen City, and you can't rest on your fat profit margin forever. Somebody in the Enquirer should do a side-by-side comparison feature article of all of these services in the Tempo section. But ... that would require almost a late-90s level technical understanding of the Internet, so I won't cross my fingers.