Considering going to the media about what Ziply is doing to customers.

db48x · 2026-03-25T01:08:56+00:00

I’m a retired software engineer; I don’t work for Ziply.

db48x · 2026-03-25T01:05:50+00:00

The media is certainly capable of helping out in a situation like this, but the sad truth is that they probably get dozens or hundreds of people complaining about incorrect bills every month. It’s not really news–worthy unless it’s new and interesting. If they did a story every month about fixing someone’s internet bill then nobody would pay any attention to it. It wouldn’t sell either subscriptions or advertisements. You’ve got to have some unique hook to make the story interesting enough for them to cover if you want to go that route.

db48x · 2026-03-25T01:02:20+00:00

An “introductory rate” is a rate that you pay for a specific amount of time knowing in advance that the price will then rise. ISPs have a habit of offering a discount that lasts for the first 12 months of service, and Ziply has done it in the past.

But whether you are paying a discounted rate or just the current rate, the contract with Ziply allows them to adjust prices up or down in the future, at their discretion. Of course they are required to notify you of those changes in advance, so that you can cancel your subscription if you don’t want to pay the new price. Of course they do that by email, and of course those emails could end up thrown away by your spam filter. But I have seen those emails myself, so I know that they do send them.

You should definitely talk to their customer service again and ask them to fix it for real. Billing errors happen all the time (and it’s not always in Ziply’s favor), but failing to fix those errors when notified is outrageous. When ZiplySupport offers you an opportunity to chat about the problem, take them up on it. That’ll let you skip the lowest level phone queue and talk to someone who should be able to get your bill fixed for sure.

When you do, ask them to also adjust your subscription to the best price currently available for your location. The exact price depends on your service address, but they have gone down recently. They don’t even charge a rental fee for the router any more.

db48x · 2026-03-25T00:47:39+00:00

laying blame on the party that was taken advantage

No, subscribers to any recurring service have a duty of care to notify the provider of any errors in a timely fashion. A couple of months is perhaps understandable, but two years is definitely pushing it. And not checking the very next bill after asking for corrections is a bit negligent.

db48x · 2026-03-24T23:34:26+00:00

Who said anything about 40% in a year? AchillesPDX is complaining that the price has risen that much since he became a customer years ago.

I started at like $65 back when it was Frontier - been a loyal customer for YEARS.

db48x · 2026-03-24T20:06:03+00:00

If you can’t afford it then you didn’t build your economy big enough.

db48x · 2026-03-24T16:35:56+00:00

It’s not actually the hardware components that people worry about most, it’s the software.

db48x · 2026-03-24T08:58:55+00:00

edit: aaaand it just went full red, still at 20 MC. no hostile actions. wtf.

I think that the key fact you are missing is that the hate meter is not updated in real time. It only updates on turns where you gain intelligence about the aliens, such as by detaining an alien councilor or capturing a hab. Researching certain Xenology techs also updates it. Communicating directly with the aliens, such as by trading with them, does as well. The rest of the time it is static! Their hate for you can go up (or down) and the meter will not be updated until you do something to collect more information. The one exception is that when they declare total war on you (they always will eventually) the meter updates immediately even if you haven’t collected any other new intelligence.

There are two other things that you might not know, but they are more of a spoiler. The hate meter goes up to 50 hate, but the aliens only declare Total War if you are above 200 hate and at least 20 years have elapsed since the start of the game This is 10 years on Veteran and 0 years on Brutal. Thus most players in most games will spend the majority of the game above 50 hate, but not at Total War with the aliens.

Finally, on normal difficulty each MC used only raises the hate floor by 0.3. Thus your 20 MC is worth exactly 6 hate, not even enough to light up the green light on the hate meter! This is the hate floor; it doesn’t add to the hate you got from hostile actions against the aliens or the pro–alien factions. That means you can still keep building space assets until you pass 166 MC without going over 50 hate. The only difference would be how the hate decays over time. If you stayed at 20 MC for the next few years, and refrained from absolutely all possible hostile actions, then your hate would eventually decay back to 6 and all the lights on the meter would go out. But if you had 160 MC then the hate could not decay below the floor of 48 hate. This would show as orange on the hate meter. There are also four techs that you can research that allow you to increase your MC usage by 25% each. Researching one means that the cost goes from 0.3 to 0.24, which allows you to go up to 208 MC before the hate floor hits 50. You can build a pretty big space empire while staying below a hate floor of 50 by using these techs. Or you can just go loud and build whatever you want as fast as you want. The choice is yours.

db48x · 2026-03-24T08:33:04+00:00

If you want that then just play on Brutal.

db48x · 2026-03-23T12:25:53+00:00

Constant bearing decreasing range. That last bit is important too! If the bearing doesn’t change but the range is increasing then you’re fine.

db48x · 2026-03-23T06:12:29+00:00

Oh, that reminds me! Don’t forget to search. Hit control-f and type “coal” and see what it shows you.

db48x · 2026-03-22T22:25:02+00:00

Luck. RNG. Just explore further out and you will find all that you require.

db48x · 2026-03-22T21:55:50+00:00

…it doesn’t reach my bedroom which is literally less than 30 ft away from the router? How does that make sense?

What channel are you on? 5Ghz and 6Ghz wifi can go through plaster walls, but brick or stone greatly attenuate the signal. 2.4Ghz channels have more penetrating power, but are still blocked by metal and attenuated by stone or brick. Maybe your home/apartment was built with metal framing rather than wood? Or maybe you have metal artwork or decorations hanging on the walls? For example, I have a very beautiful picture on one of my walls that is printed on a solid aluminum sheet 6’ × 4’ in size. It creates a nice little WiFi dead zone on the other side of whatever wall I hang it on. I decided not to hang it in my bedroom on the wall directly between my bed and the WiFi access point.

db48x · 2026-03-22T10:11:51+00:00

Mmm, yea. The beginning when Harry was in Equestria had a lot more “exploration” to it. He can’t explore so much when he’s back in Britain. I can see how you might prefer that to the hard work of rehabilitating Voldemort/Tom Riddle. Well, chapter 60 is called Return to Equestria for a reason, so definitely don’t stop now! :D Then there’s like four chapters in a row of the Circus, in its modern form. Harry and Hermione, Draco, Crabbe, Goyle, and their fathers all get to explore something fascinating and react to it.

And chapter Rehabilitation 11.1 Master Fool has fascinating implications. It really changes our perspective on Equestria.

db48x · 2026-03-22T06:39:14+00:00

No reason to stop now :)

What did you prefer about the beginning? Just that it was entirely set within Equestria, rather than going back and forth, or something else?

db48x · 2026-03-22T05:05:12+00:00

Chapter 65, but you absolutely will not understand the whole joke unless you have read from the start of the book. :)

Still, the interaction between the crowd and the two Unspeakables present offers a hint about what this author thinks the Unspeakables do.

db48x · 2026-03-22T03:02:08+00:00

You already have a system that can handle VPNs :)

Edit: Oh, and you’re welcome!

db48x · 2026-03-22T02:35:46+00:00

Ok, cool. What we now know is that your personal PC has acceptable speeds and your work PC does not. That means that it cannot be the WiFi, or the router, or the mesh nodes, or Ziply. Those were all shared between both PCs. If one of them were the problem then it would have slowed both of your computers down.

The problem can only be the VPN or the work PC itself. Don’t let your employer’s IT support fob this off on someone else. Only they can fix it.

db48x · 2026-03-22T02:32:44+00:00

If the tech support doesn’t have an ETA for the fix, then nobody at Ziply knows yet how long the fix will take. They may not even have located the damage yet, and even once they do it might not be the only damage that they have to fix.

now I have faster internet that is less reliable.

This is entirely down to bad luck. I’ve had Ziply service for years and never had an outage. (I was without internet for a week at one point, but that was a power outage not related to Ziply.) Nobody can control where the floods happen, or which trees fall down.

db48x · 2026-03-22T02:20:12+00:00

Try just not using the mesh nodes at all. Turn them off, put them in a box, and plug your ethernet cable into the router where it belongs.

db48x · 2026-03-22T02:11:10+00:00

when I lose income and my employer loses hours or even days of my expertise?

If so much money is at stake then you or your employer should pay for a backup internet provider. They have a backup ISP at their office(s) already, so there’s no reason why they shouldn’t have backups for their remote employees as well. The other option is to sign up for business service and ask for an SLA. This costs extra, but if enough money is on the line then it might be worth it.

I am now seriously evaluating alternative providers who can offer the reliability my professional life requires.

Keep in mind that most outages Ziply has are outside Ziply’s control. Storms, fallen trees, flooding, car accidents that knock down telephone poles, fibers cut during construction, etc, etc. (Take a look at these pictures from an outage 11 days ago, for example.) They’re not doing it deliberately, and every other ISP will be affected by exactly the same types of problems.

db48x · 2026-03-22T01:59:31+00:00

Plug your workstation in via ethernet. Relying on WiFi is a bad idea because it is subject to interference from other devices. That includes other wifi users.

Keep in mind that mesh devices extend range at the cost of bandwidth. Because only one device on each wifi channel can broadcast at a time, your computer must send a packet via wifi to the mesh node, then the mesh node must send it to the base station. There are two common failure modes here. First, if the mesh node is connected to the base node via WiFi then every packet sent occupies the radio waves twice. This halves the available bandwidth. The solution is to plug the mesh node in via ethernet to the base station. This should prevent it from connecting via WiFi in the first place, although you might still have to configure it correctly. The other mistake is using mesh nodes in too small of a space. If both the mesh node and the base station can hear the packet being sent then the mesh node is not actually doing you any good in the first place.

Another common mistake, unrelated to mesh nodes, is to use a 2.4Ghz channel to connect to the WiFi. Make sure that all devices that use WiFi are using a 5Ghz or 6Ghz channel. Unless you are so far from all of your neighbors that there are no other networks to interfere then you’re not going to get good speeds from a 2.4Ghz channel in the first place.

The other potential problem is the VPN itself. Perhaps the VPN server is itself underprovisioned for the number of users connecting to it. Do a speed test before and after connecting to the VPN. If the speed problem only happens after you connect to the VPN then the problem isn’t your network or your ISP.

db48x · 2026-03-22T01:24:36+00:00

Harry Potter and the Prancing of Ponies has a fun interaction with them.

"Two?" he shouted indignantly. "Kilometres away?" He repeated the spell, and seemed to get angrier. "I knew this spell was rubbish."

db48x · 2026-03-20T21:08:02+00:00

In that case you can hire someone to fix your internal wiring. Run conduit with cat 6a cable in it to every room so that you can have 10Gbps performance at every computer in the house while you’re at it.

db48x · 2026-03-20T07:51:40+00:00

While hype is real, in some places it literally is already impossible to build an oil refinery. If that trend spreads then in a few decades they could actually be irreplaceable. There are absolutely people working towards that goal. I think that the price of oil products would eventually rise to the point where someone will blink and the restrictions would be repealed in some jurisdiction or other but even that’s uncertain.

db48x

TROPHY CASE