Whew! I'm back in San Diego after 2 1/2 weeks in Alabama doing the 1031 Sprint. That's where you have a very limited time window to get a river house up and running for vacation rentals and also buy a long-term rental house in Spanish Fort to soak up the proceeds of a house sale in San Diego. The 1031 refers to the IRS tax code that allows us to defer capital gains when selling one income property to purchase other income property.
The river house is near the end of a cul-de-sac in Baldwin County. Think farm country ornamented with the jewel of Alabama, Fairhope, nestled on the shores of Mobile Bay. As such, there's not much fiber laid there and definitely none at the river house. There, your terrestrial option is a classically incompetent cable company, with (helpful?) customer service located in Bangalore. You can expect DSL speeds of about 6 Mbps down and around 500k up. That is bound to get you poor reviews by vacation renters who have to deal with wailing children, stuck inside on a rainy day, unable to download and watch the Blues Clues episode where the pair breaks up a Pakistani rape gang in Telford.
Starlink to the rescue!
I quickly assessed the Internet sitch and ordered a Starlink system, not realizing the hardware is sold at various stores in the region, including Walmart, Home Depot, Lowes and others. As the order was processed and the estimated delivery date revealed, it became apparent that Starlink wasn't going to be able to deliver until after we'd left.
That would not do, so I managed to find a Walmart in Pensacola that still had a Starlink 4X terminal, the latest model. Everywhere closer was sold out. I imagine that SpaceX is building the things as fast as androidly possible and they're flying off the shelves at that same rate.
One slight problem. The service I ordered would not be active until the hardware arrived. I had numerous chat sessions with Starlink's Grok chatbot and it seemed the problem was unsolvable. Grok recommended I create a trouble ticket nonetheless, so I did so, expecting nothing.
The next day, out of the blue, I got a phone call from Starlink customer service. It was a real person, one who spoke perfect English and perfectly trained on the product line. She told me she had seen my trouble ticket and then patiently and politely walked me through the process to activate my Walmart-purchased antenna, which we had installed on the boat house roof the day before. Within 15 minutes, I had full 100 Mbps down and 20 Mbps up through a phased array antenna to satellites zooming by overhead.
Un-freaking-believable. I didn't call them, they proactively called me. On top of that, she escalated my ticket to get me a refund on my order from Starlink. That evening, another customer service rep from SpaceX called to tell me my order had been canceled and my credit card fully refunded.
Elon Musk is worth every penny of his trillion dollars.
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| Take a bow, my dude. |
Special Bonus Content
Leave it to the Babylon Bee to do a great bit on Elon's trillion dollars while channeling my character, Cat.
3 comments:
It is interesting just how much more successful Musk's rocket company is than Bezos's Blue Origin. Even though they both started at about the same time, SpaceX and Starlink are so much further ahead it isn't even funny. And it apparently is entirely a difference in management philosophy. SpaceX is taking the approach that blowing up rockets isn't a big deal, just as long as you learn something from doing it. Meanwhile, Blue Origin is so risk-averse that they look to be practically paralyzed. Also, from what you say about Starlink, their philosopy is apparently that they have a job to do, and they are going to satisfy their customers at all costs using whatever resources they have available. Meanwhile, I've had a few professional interactions with Blue Origin, and they are the most secretive and snobbish* company I have ever encountered.
*They were trying to branch out into lunar resource extraction, particularly iron extraction, and I had been put in touch with them because I have been working in iron ore processing/ironmaking for ages. They basically had an attitude that they already knew everything, and that as a non-Blue-Origin person, I couldn't possibly have any useful advice for them. We'll see how that works out for them in the long run.
Wow. That's quite the attitude. In essence, they contacted you because they were concerned that you didn't feel sufficiently inferior.
Going back to your assessment of Starlink customer service, at work there were support groups who were emotionally invested in your success and ones that couldn't have cared less. I used to joke that if a deadly virus ran through the workforce, our IT people would simply step over the dead bodies in the hallway as they went to the local Subway to get lunch. The guys and gals in Shipping, however, were eager to understand your needs and clever about flexing the rules to make sure your stuff got where it needed to go on time.
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