1 I use Spectrum for my phone and internet service here in the Twin Cities of Minnesota area, too. And until recently for cable, too (recently succumbed to AT&T's blandishments and switched to DirecTV three months ago, but that's a story for another day). Since then, we have had one 30-hour outage on both phone and internet, and a number of short, mostly two to five-minute, internet outages. The big one was area-wide and caused us (and everyone else) a great deal of pain, especially not having phones, since cell phone service is, well, rotten in our home.

The short outages can usually be fixed by re-booting the cable modem. But they're happening maybe two or three times a week. I'm beginning to wonder if it needs to be replaced, but the last time I had to make a service call, when they asked me its brand name and I told them, they said nothing about "Gee, we should send you a more modern model."

You're thinking "Why don't you switch?" Answer: there is no other cable provider in our area.