The wasteland between Harvard and MIT
While sitting at my desk, if I turn my head to the right, I can see the famous MIT dome and part of the roof of the Stata Center. If I turn my head to the left, I can see parts of the Harvard empire. StyleFeeder is located between two of the most famous universities in the world and within a stone’s throw of one of the birthplaces of the Internet (the other two being CERN and UIUC). The amount of bandwidth running through the fiber cables buried beneath the sidewalk under my feet as I walk around Central Square makes this one of the most wired places on the planet. Indeed, Forbes ranks Boston fifth in the US for “wiredness.”
One would think that the options for getting blazingly fast Internet access at the StyleFeeder offices would be plentiful and cheap, right?
I live one town over from Cambridge and I get very reliable, very fast (20Mbps down / 2Mbps up) Internet access via the monopoly cable provider available to me as part of a bundle that probably breaks out to ~$40-50/month. It’s actually great. I don’t have major complaints.
Zip back over to our StyleFeeder office in Cambridge and the best we have available to us is a crappy Verizon DSL connection (ostensibly-but-not-really 7Mbps down and something stupidly slow upstream) for $200/month. Frigging wonderful.
Occasionally, Comcast drops off flyers advertising service in our building. Our entire company is under strict orders not to let any Comcast employee seen on our premises leave until they can get us a Comcast rep on the phone who is both able and willing to sell us Internet service. As much as we’d like to take up Comcast’s offer to pay them for reliable, fast Internet service, they historically have not returned our phone calls and generally ignore us. One of my friends who lives literally a block away from our office has good Internet service from Comcast in her house, so this must be possible.
In the meantime, I’m left staring at MIT wondering why on earth I can’t tap into the wires that are running underneath our building.
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Comcast Corp.
National Customer Operations
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