As I mentioned in my last post, I recently accepted a new job. With that new job came the opportunity to lease a new office downtown. And lease one I did! It's in an interesting old building just a block off of the capitol square. It is infinitely better than any of the soul-sucking cubicle farms in the standard office parks out there in sprawlsville.
So, why am I pissed off? Mad City Broadband. For those who might not know what I'm talking about, Mad City Broadband is our "Municipal WiFi" network. What it really is, is some sort of terrible joke.
Being on a budget, as anyone involved with a small business should be, this service is appealing based on advertised cost and promised bandwidth. Since my new office contains just one employee (me) it seemed like the perfect solution. Wrong. I quickly learned that "speeds up to 1mb/sec" really means you're gonna spend a lot of time wishing you had a phone line and a 14.4kbps modem.
A week has gone by since I've subscribed to their service and it is still unusable. This is perplexing as I'm able to receive near-perfect signal strength. Instead of using the service that I paid for, I'm forced to pirate a nearby open access point with half the signal strength and 50X the performance. MCB assures me they are working on the issue. Every day they say "This is a new technology, please be patient." Today I called AT&T to come and set up DSL. It's a shame though, as I was hoping to use this alternative instead of one of the big guys.
Does anyone in town actually have good results with Mad City Broadband? I'm pretty sure city government bought into this thing with the idea that it would add to Madison's appeal as a tech center. Unfortunately, it fails in that respect.
A week has gone by since I've subscribed to their service and it is still unusable. This is perplexing as I'm able to receive near-perfect signal strength. Instead of using the service that I paid for, I'm forced to pirate a nearby open access point with half the signal strength and 50X the performance. MCB assures me they are working on the issue. Every day they say "This is a new technology, please be patient." Today I called AT&T to come and set up DSL. It's a shame though, as I was hoping to use this alternative instead of one of the big guys.
Does anyone in town actually have good results with Mad City Broadband? I'm pretty sure city government bought into this thing with the idea that it would add to Madison's appeal as a tech center. Unfortunately, it fails in that respect.
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