Hints dealing with ISPs?

[715]

Scuzzy (or anyone): do you have any hints on how to deal with ISPs? 

The quality of service of my cable ISP has become dreadful during prime time (i.e. late afternoon after kids get home to around midnight, with another blip in the morning just before people go to work).  During peak times my 3/0.25 account can see rates down to 0.1/0.1 and latencies as high as 4 seconds.  And I pay $46/month for this.  It has nothing to do with the inet backbone, its all my ISP (latencies are enormous on the first hop to the ISP).  If I complain all they will do is roll a truck to check for a carrier.  Is there any secret word that gets you to upper tiers of support?  Or do you suspect doing so would be pointless and I'm just out of luck because they probably have massively oversold their cable network (the truck guy said I was on a node with 500 other customers)?

[dentin]

Scuzzy (or anyone): do you have any hints on how to deal with ISPs? 

The quality of service of my cable ISP has become dreadful during prime time (i.e. late afternoon after kids get home to around midnight, with another blip in the morning just before people go to work).  During peak times my 3/0.25 account can see rates down to 0.1/0.1 and latencies as high as 4 seconds.  And I pay $46/month for this.  It has nothing to do with the inet backbone, its all my ISP (latencies are enormous on the first hop to the ISP).  If I complain all they will do is roll a truck to check for a carrier.  Is there any secret word that gets you to upper tiers of support?  Or do you suspect doing so would be pointless and I'm just out of luck because they probably have massively oversold their cable network (the truck guy said I was on a node with 500 other customers)?

DSL?? 

[Infidelz]

You need to monitor your connection and demand refunds for each day you don't get the service you were promised. I have done this successfully in the past.

INFIDEL>

[715]

DSL?? 

Too far from the central office. 

My only other choices are dialup or a fly by night wireless service that is slow (1M) and expensive.  I wonder what percentage of the US population actually has any viable competition available for broadband.

[715]

You need to monitor your connection and demand refunds for each day you don't get the service you were promised. I have done this successfully in the past.

INFIDEL>

I could do this but they'd have to give me about 50% of my bill back for every weekday and more on weekends   Somehow I don't think my particular cable company will entertain this idea: when I first went there to complain about the service there were big notices taped to the door that said yelling at the counter personnel will not be tolerated.  Something tells me that no one is very happy with them and something else tells me they don't particularly care.