People love complaining about their Internet service providers, and quite often they have very good reasons for doing so.

After our story "Why Comcast and other cable ISPs aren’t selling you gigabit Internet" ran Sunday night, I got a few e-mails from readers suffering from Internet service oddities. One man in Irvine, California complained that the top bandwidth he can buy is 18Mbps down and 1.5Mbps up even though fiber runs right to his home.

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A man who lives in a rural area 30 miles outside St. Louis tells a more disturbing tale.

"Charter Cable provides speedy Internet access except for the very last block on my street, even though there are a dozen or more houses in that last bit," he wrote. "Why? Because they sized their box for the area at the low end, and going to the next larger box would cost too much. They've told me they would provide access—if I'll pay $18,000 for the connection."

A lack of competition has this man stranded without any good Internet option. "That wouldn't be so awful, but the fact that Charter came in and covered both most of the area and the area easiest to access means no one else is interested," he wrote. "I can't even interest a little Wi-Fi company in putting up a tower, since 'Charter covers your area.' I haven't been able to find any Internet service company at all, leaving me with the choice of using cellular (And naturally, while I have a 4G tower close enough to get 5 bar service from AT&T and Verizon, no provider with an unlimited plan covers my area) or dial-up. I'm stuck either spending a fortune or living in the '80s."

After hearing horror stories like that one, it was obvious we needed to ask you fine people to tell us your own tales of woe. Some of you might have already joined the next generation with gigabit-class fiber service. We're betting many others are suffering from sub-broadband speeds, a "choice" of only one awful provider, or expensive service that can't even play a YouTube video.

Granted, this won't be the first (or even 500th) time Ars readers have complained about Internet service in comment threads. But let's focus on getting the most absurd and infuriating stories into this thread—later this week, we'll gather the best ones into a report summarizing the worst of the worst suffered by Ars readers.

Ladies and gentleman, start your complaint engines.