Euro Internet growing pains

Many of my European friends often suffer from technical problems with their internet like we do in North America. For many reasons, it seems that it's always a major deal in Europe, where service providers and techies are hard to reach, take a long time to intervene and make the whole experience much more disruptive than it's right here for us. We generally get our service from either cable or telephone companies which are all pretty good with their customer service.

Besides, the high level of competition between these providers tends to level the playing field and provide all of us with a decent standard of assistance. On the techie side we began with the independent computer technicians that at first varied vastly in their expertise level, response time and fees, but this heterogeneous group is now forced into a more uniform behavior by large computer stores' in-house service, such as Best Buy's “Geek Squad” and others, that are bringing added consistency and expediency to the whole process. Give it some more time and that will reach European shores too!