• ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I used to work for a cable company whose name rhymes with “bombast”. They offer a wifi service whose name is a derivation of the word “infinity”. Most of the hotspots for this wifi service are provided by the Bombast wireless routers that cable customers have in their homes. So if you’re a Bombast customer, you’re helping to pay the electrical bill and giving up bandwidth in order to provide Infinity wifi.

    Another fun Bombast story: the founder, a man who always wore a bowtie, died a few years ago. At a memorial service in his honor, a number of vice presidents and other executives (including my boss at the time) wore bowties. Everyone who wore a bowtie to the service was fired within a week.

          • ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            I have no idea why they were fired or who fired them - I just know that they were fired.

            Bombast had a lot of helplessly incompetent (and sometimes clinically insane) executives running things, but they never lasted that long. There seemed to be some sort of Avenging Angel of Death wandering the Bombast Center and culling the more useless examples of management. My bowtie-wearing boss was one of these and certainly deserved the axe, but I don’t know if this was true of the other members of the bowtie brigade.

            • Aidan@lemm.ee
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              1 year ago

              I was going to say that sounds like something out of 30 Rock, but then I realized it should be because Comcast is Kabletown

            • BilboBargains@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              It sounds like the Steven Seagull movie, Marked For Death, over there at Bombast. People who manage telecoms firms are a special kind of psycho. None of their pricing makes any sense. It’s money for old rope and there are massive variations in service and value that depend on the customers having no choice in the matter because there is so little competition in the market.

    • SetheryVanDamn@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      The shared internet thing is a setting that comes turned on for Xfinity routers by default (aka the ones you rent from them). If you go into the settings of the router you can turn the wifi sharing setting off.

    • zuhayr@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      If you disconnect your existing connection, and got a new one using another name, saying that you’re new occupant, you can get that new connection discount (over and over again).

      • 丂イ乇尺レノ刀ム@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I’ve never had to disconnect. Once the discount has expired, I just go online and check the prices for changing my internet speed. Most of the time there’s a discounted one (with a contract agreement of course). But I’ve been switching back and forth between different speeds for years and saved a lot of money that way. Also buy your own modem/router instead of paying rental fees for their equipment.

      • Maslo@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Careful, sometimes they’ll come out just to pull your plug from a concentrator when you disconnect, or it just happens when they’re hooking up a new customer and yours gets unplugged to make room. But then they turn around and charge like $50 just to come out and plug that back in for a new install. That can be the entire install, you can bring your own modem and have everything fine inside, but some yahoo charges $50 to come out and plug some coax into a concentrator in a box 20 ft from your house that they unplugged for free last week.

      • squozenode@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        With Time Warner you don’t even have to do that you can just call up and ask, they’ll probably give you the discount. They absolutely do not care.

    • Shad0w@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Once I realized this I turned it off on my modem/router. I turned the router function off completely to be able to use my own equipment rather than the crap they give you.

        • Shad0w@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Yes, it disappeared completely. It was in the modem settings, I found it when disabling the router function.

      • LordOfTheChia@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Not the OP, but my speculation? The new folks in charge didn’t like the founder and the people who looked up to him and wanted to take the company in a completely different direction.

        They likely already knew who the loyalists were before the funeral, but if not, those who self identified by wearing bowties would work just as well.

    • BananaPeal@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      Oh Spectrum does this too. How else would you have it in an apartment complex down a dead end road with nothing else around? This, among other reasons, is why I bought my own modem and router.

    • van2z@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      This is why I bought/own my own modem and my own router, and I known that the modem doesn’t come with an access point feature.

    • Flax@feddit.uk
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      2 months ago

      BT does the same exact thing in the UK lol. I thought it was common knowledge