Attack of the Service Tech
October 14th, 2005For those who commented with cable modem suggestions: our cable modem has fresh ‘n hardy wires from the pole right into the house. Service techs have checked and reconnected every connection. We saw people on the pole today, but alas, we dropped again (after a nice afternoon of cable modem access at very fast speed).
DSL install required a visit (the very next day) from a dude who knew his shit. Put a box on the outside of the house that has some sweet diagnostic and filtering magic, discovered the 79 year old wireposts that were still working as the master wire block for the house. This block has a wire in place that runs straight to the jack for the DSL. We get up to 2.2 Mbps service but Qwest sells only 1.5, saying that higher speeds are coming. The DSL tech walked me through everything he did and it took about 45 minutes for him to finish. Our upload speeds are double the cable modem, but the downstream is noticeably slower than the cable modem. However, the DSL is reliable and running. I had forgotten what it’s like to just have access without the stair running exercise and a power cycle on the cable modem and router.
The tech for DSL was about 300 times more friendly and more knowledgeable than any of the cable guys. He mentioned that the phone company was upgrading their system all over the valley, but couldn’t say when the box in our neighborhood would be upgraded. I received a phone call with a survey asking how everything went. I gave them high marks for getting the service running, even though it took an extra day.
By contrast, the cable provider has sent out three different people, none of whom could address or fix the issue, as it appears to be a line issue. It would appear that is where all those fees are going; to fund an army of people not empowered to fix anything and who refuse to escalate problems.
It would appear that we are now functioning as a family again and all is right with the world.
Here’s the part where my recent tech disaster recovery and backup planning starts to take over. What about redundancy? What happens when the service we decide to go with drops again? It’s going to happen. How will we deal with that? I’m not going to be able to fall back on my Arabian horse club experience or get a “good job Brownie” from the president.
If we are going to run a business of publishing and other online endeavors, it would seem prudent to have a backup way to get online, and seeing as we don’t have dialup access to fall back on… that means we’d have both cable and DSL. I know that it seems like overkill, but after the past 2.5 weeks of spotty access, I’m thinking it’s worth the extra $30 a month just to have both services and use whichever one is up. Only because we’re both needing to be online whenever we have to be. Being online is both bread and butter. Wait, maybe it’s more like bacon.
If I’m going to live on the wrong side of the online tracks, I will at least try not to have two motor vehicles on cinderblocks in the front yard, one of which would be coated in primer, the other a more “long term” project consisting of chassis and half a body with some bondo applied in patches. I will also not have the dishwasher from 1992 that has a litter of six cats living in it.
For the record, Heather is not buying my rationale. She is liking the bondo idea…. o
October 14th, 2005 at 3:50 pm
It’s great to hear that your DSL experience went smoothly. If you want guaranteed service, than you might have to upgrade to a higher line like a T1 or some sort of business-class DSL, but expect to pay way more than $30 a month. I also don’t think verizon guarantees connectivity, even with the Business DSL packages.
Also, make sure your MTU settings on your router are set to 1492. According to dslreports.com, a MTU setting of 1492 is better for DSL. (I have personally set this number to 1400 in some my customer’s accounts, it seems to increase speed.) You might want to try it and see what happens.
October 14th, 2005 at 6:11 pm
>Hmmmm… I wonder if you could sit outside the >store in your car and get a connection to the >T-Mobile Hotspot….
You can! I sent an email at midnight from a closed Starbucks (in Ellensburg WA) while on a road trip. But, I’m single, without children and my day job doesn’t involve the internet so I can do that sort of thing.
October 14th, 2005 at 9:38 pm
good luck with Qwest. i found them to be very very evil, trying to get me to pay for hundreds of dollars of service that was never provided or used! i am SO glad not to have to deal with them anymore.
October 14th, 2005 at 10:59 pm
Um, when you find the argument that makes her eyes light up and her mouth say, “Ah, yes!” WILL YOU PLEASE SHARE IT WITH THE REST OF US!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Maybe if you promise to never ask about the naked housework thing again…
October 15th, 2005 at 3:46 am
Are you sure you don’t have dialup? I had a free dialup account with my DSL for when I was traveling. It’s pretty much SOP here (in CA). You might have to call for the settings and a password, but I think it should be included.
October 15th, 2005 at 8:23 am
Um yeah. What is it about shotty internet that makes you just CRAZY?!? It isn’t even my bread and butter, and our crap DSL makes me insane.
October 15th, 2005 at 11:58 am
if you can find a few neighbors who have been thinking about getting online but haven’t yet, you could set yourselves up as a wireless ISP. a T1/DS1 with a decent service level agreement might be had for around $300/month and would come with 1.5mbps symmetric. you can put a couple of omnis on your roof and charge your neighbors $40-50/mo for access (or barter). as a backup solution to your DSL line, this is pretty complicated… but you’d learn a lot.
October 15th, 2005 at 12:26 pm
Get both connections, then get a load balancing router, something like:
http://peterkaminski.com/archives/000452.html
DLink –> http://tinyurl.com/datll
HotBrick –> http://tinyurl.com/96456
Linksys –> http://tinyurl.com/drv52
Netgear –> http://tinyurl.com/creop
Xincom –> http://tinyurl.com/af29q
October 15th, 2005 at 2:53 pm
HMMMM- being i do school online it sucks to take my shit to the library esp since i only get 1 hour online and the total time each way is 30 min! I agree with getting the second service- heck you can write them both off cause you both have site and it feeds your fam!
October 15th, 2005 at 3:38 pm
Specialb, thanks for those links. I was wondering if there wasn’t a device that would share both lines and automatically handle requests and downtime. I wonder if that router would work with a wireless router as well.
October 15th, 2005 at 4:12 pm
You are a broadband junkie! I think heroin junkies like to keep a few percocets around the house. just in case…
October 15th, 2005 at 5:41 pm
Jon, this is off topic but this morning when I was watching our local news, they ran a nationally run spot (I think it was a CBS story)and the subject was about women and technology. In the beginning they showed short snippets of different women saying what they can’t live without and I SWEAR I think they showed Heather saying, “my iPod”. Was that really her? It sure looked just exactly like her. I hope you will respond here because I am dying of curiosity!
October 15th, 2005 at 5:42 pm
what exactly do you have, hardware-wise? if you’re simply talking a WiFi Access Point (AP) then sure it will work. Even if it’s a DSL/Cable Router with the AP built-in, that can be done–just shut off everything but the WiFi AP and let the Dual WAN device be your perimeter buddy. email me…
October 15th, 2005 at 7:37 pm
I just give a hearty “Ya’ll stink” because I live in the boonies (i.e. rural area) and Verizon doesn’t know how to spell DSL and wont get any high speed acess for sometime. The only alternative is satellite access and thats about $2 million a month…
October 16th, 2005 at 6:12 pm
Oh, Ann, if you REALLY lived in BFE you wouldn’t have DSL. Here in rural Maine I thought we were going to have to live with (shudder) dial-up or the insanely expensive satellite Gordon mentioned (Gordon, did you get the “we don’t have any idea when we might consider doing DSL in your area and no, there is no one in the whole company who does know, so stop asking” speech from Verizon like I did?), but our house is one of the very lucky few in our area that can get a wireless T1 signal through microwaves coming off a tower on a hill a couple of miles away to an antenna in my attic window. I love this service. Occasionally it goes wonky in bad weather, but it is pretty stable and fast. Is something like that an option, Jon, other than creating a similar network yourself?
October 17th, 2005 at 2:48 am
Jon — you should start up your own wireless/cable/dsl whatever you like best provider. It would answer your question as to how to make your own money without working for The Man. And in an area where I’m sure there must be many dissatisfied customers such as yourself, why not take things into your own hands and fix the problem yourself! I couldn’t give any specs as to what it would take to set up, but I don’t think it’s all too much. You should look into it!
October 17th, 2005 at 7:39 am
I second the idea of a business class DSL install. I’m not sure what the deal is in Utah, but we had a SDSL line installed. 1.5mb up and down, 5 static IPs and somebody to yell at (and will listen) when/if it goes down. Cheaper than a T1 too.
October 17th, 2005 at 11:33 am
I am so spoiled here with my cable internet. Almost 100% uptime, 100% fibre in a new neigbourhood, advertised 9 Megabit download speed (usually around 5 to 6 acutal) with 1 megabit uploads, no 3rd party p2p filtering and 5 email addresses. . .
And now I just have to wait until Christmas to get my Tivo from my mom in Albuquerque! Tivo service is FINALLY available in Canada!
Life will be good.
October 17th, 2005 at 11:37 am
BTW,
If our cable service DOES go down we have backup dailup provided by our ISP. I can use this from work too.
Check with your ISPs to see if you have it included in either of your packages.
October 17th, 2005 at 7:15 pm
We are thinking we need both at work, for exactly the same reasons you mentioned. Medical office + computer access down = not a good thing!
October 18th, 2005 at 12:37 pm
Heck, in an emergency, just whip out your handy Treo with the data plan, connect it up to your PC (or maybe Mac if you have the conversion for the cradle) and enjoy state-of-the-art-two-years-ago 200 baud speeds. An ex of mine did it when his apartment [wallet] couldn’t even handle regular telephone lines and dialup. He was crazy.
October 19th, 2005 at 7:16 pm
Reading your adventures with cable internet reads almost word for word what my bf and I have been through. We had cable for a few months and never had good access. Multiple trips out here with various reapair men and being told the apartment was tood old and how the wires arae too old and we’ve over run the modem (?), ect., ect., ad naseum. Now, we’ve got DSL. We’re on al the time, we’re fast and it’s a blessing!
October 24th, 2005 at 12:26 pm
I had a similar experience. Had cable for 3 years, no problems. Then, out of the blue the friggin modem would reset every 0:30. One guy told us that squirrels had chewed the cable. One guy told us that there was a union of the cables that water was getting into. One guy told us they would replace a box on my street. Eight service calls and no resolution. I finally switched to DSL and sent an angry letter to the president of the broadband provider, which I’m sure was tossed without being read.
The fact of the matter here is that it isn’t rocket science. There is a cable–with a solid copper strand in the middle and braided wire on the outside. As long as its intact, you should get a stable signal. The only way this is NOT the cable company’s responsibility to fix is if the problem lies in the inanimate cable inside of your house, which is highly unlikely. They should run a new cable into the house by visit #5. To me it’s absolutely inexcusable for it to take more visits than that.
Anyway, I have been on DSL for 4 years now and have been down once–for two days. That’s not bad for 4 years. And yes, the DSL companies, in my experience tend to be more helpful and professional.
As far as redundancy goes, so far I’m onboard with piggybacking on a neighbor’s connection if yours goes down–considering you aren’t hosting out of your home. Hell, for that matter, you can probably find an open wireless connection to pirate with little effort. If you are hosting though, then you’ve got port forwarding to contend with and that won’t work. If that’s the case, I’d go with cable as a backup.
October 24th, 2005 at 1:35 pm
I just had a suddent-onset brainstorm that sounds as good in my head as chocolate and peanut butter in the same candy wrapper:
load-balancing router + wireless ethernet bridge = the best of both worlds!
Just tune the wireless bridge to a neighbor’s unsecured access point, then hook it up to one of the WAN ports of the load-balancing router that SpecialB recommended… that way, you’re using DSL 99% of the time, and then it switches to the wireless bridge and piggybacks off your neighbor when you’re down! No midnight runs to Starbucks, no wacky cell-phone hookups or dragging dialup (I get the feeling you don’t have a traditional landline anyway, with two cell phones)… all the advantages of a redundant connection, without the monthly expense!
(NOTE this requires a friendly and/or security-ignorant neighbor within WiFi distance, but still…)
wireless ethernet bridge: ~$50
XiNCOM twin-WAN router: $135 at NewEgg.com
piece of mind: Priceless