Next Monday the 7th, from noon - 4pm at Stewart Park.

There will be classic cookout food and music by the 86er’s and Rich Sterns & Friends, as well as around 20 groups joining us to table on issues that are important to our community. So come out for the fun and leave with a way to join a group or union fighting for a better world for us all!

In addition to all the fun, we will be honoring some of the many working class wins with awards to celebrate the victories and uplift local struggles. In times when things seem so terrible, we have to remember to celebrate the good things that are happening so we can build hope for a future where workers have more power and dignity on and off the job.

If you believe that pineapple on Pizza is an abomination this post is not for you.

For the rest of humanity, the chicken pineapple slice at Pizzaroma is amazing. It's almost like a chicken parm with pineapple on top. Delicious.

I honestly don’t know what residents at Collegetown Terrace are supposed to do about the Internet situation anymore.

Since moving in, FiberSpark has been incredibly unreliable. I’ve experienced repeated complete outages, severe packet loss, and huge jitter, especially in the evenings. There have been times when the connection is technically “online” but is basically unusable for gaming, Zoom, or even normal Internet use.

I’ve done a ridiculous amount of troubleshooting at this point. I’m using wired Ethernet, not Wi-Fi. My connection to the local gateway can be completely stable while packet loss appears immediately upstream and continues to the final destination. During one outage, I was seeing around 87% packet loss to Google while the local gateway still had 0% loss.

What makes this even more frustrating is FiberSpark’s customer service. I’ve sent them multiple tests, screenshots, WinMTR results, and repeated follow-up emails. They’ve acknowledged that there are broader network problems, but I still haven’t gotten a meaningful explanation of the cause, what exactly they’re doing to fix it, or a realistic ETA. Lately they have barely responded to my follow-ups at all.

So I tried to solve the problem myself. I was willing to pay for Spectrum out of my own pocket and keep FiberSpark as-is. There is already a coax outlet in my apartment. Spectrum sent a technician, but the technician needed access to the building’s communications/mechanical areas to trace or activate the old coax connection.

CTT told me they would not allow the Spectrum technician access, so I ultimately had to cancel the Spectrum installation.

That’s the part that really gets me. If the Internet included with the apartment were reliable, fine. But when the provided ISP is having repeated outages and severe packet loss, residents apparently also can’t independently pay for another wired provider to get a reliable connection.

At this point I’ve literally had to use my phone hotspot because it is more usable than my apartment Internet.

For the amount of rent CTT charges, I really don’t think “use your cellular hotspot because the building Internet doesn’t work and you can’t install an alternative” is an acceptable situation.

Has anyone else at CTT been dealing with the same FiberSpark outages/packet loss? I’d especially be interested to know if people in other CTT buildings are seeing the same thing.

Does any restaurant in Ithaca do this? (That is worth the money).