31st
After eight months of service, my AT&T DSL modem (Motorola brand) has already gone belly-up. Eight months of sitting on a shelf and then poof—dead. The best that the technical support staff can offer is, “did you try restarting your computer?” Luckily I found another modem in the closet, connected it, and voila: problem solved.
Is it too much to ask for home networking equipment not to self-destruct after less than a year of use? Maybe it is just my luck: my cable modems, DSL modems, routers and access points never seem to work for very long.
Coincidentally this hardware failure happened a day after AT&T hiked their DSL fees without notice. I had to dig through the fine print to find it. The reason for the higher fees? “To continue providing you the high quality features and leading service value you’ve come to expect from AT&T.”
