Signal To Noise
Posted on | November 18, 2008 at 8:56 pm | 6 Comments
Yeah, I know I’ve been pretty silent lately. That’s mostly because I’ve really been enjoying my time off from blogging and I like having time to do other things. But it’s also partly laziness. And it’s also because of the problems I’ve been having with my Internet connection, which have finally been solved. Hopefully.
Therein lies a tale. I get my DSL through my local phone company, which starts with the letter “Q”. My brother-in-law is pretty high up in this company, so I don’t want to disparage them too much. (Plus, he helped me out with my issues.) But there’s a lot that just don’t sit right with me about this whole thing. It all started about a month or so ago when I noticed when surfing at night I would get occasional timeouts (”server not found”, etc). According to the lights on the modem, it looked like the Internet connection was briefly going away and then coming back. As the days passed, the problem got worse and worse. The symptoms were similar to ones I experienced when my DSL modem was going bad. I was on my third modem, which had lasted for awhile, so I figured it was time to get a new one. I called up company Q’s support line during lunch at work and talked to someone obviously offshore who didn’t think the problem was the modem. The modem was leased and I was paying like $3/month. I was annoyed and figured they just didn’t want to replace it. But he told me to call back when I was home and they could diagnose the problem. I didn’t feel like going through all that, so I just went ahead and ordered their latest spiffy new advanced networking modem, as a purchase instead of a rental. I was tired of the leasing game and I wanted a more modern modem anyway. The manufacturer doesn’t even make the old one anymore.
So I hooked up the new modem and it seemed to work (after another call to tech support to get them to tell me how to get to the manual configuration, since their automatic one wasn’t working). But then later that night, I started experiencing the same connection problems. And this new modem has a big old red light that goes on when the connection is broken, so it’s easy to see when it’s having problems. Which was pretty frequently. So I called up my Internet Service Provider (ISP). They ran some tests and said there was no problem on their end, but they could see I was definitely getting a lot of errors and disconnects. They said it was either something in my house or a problem with the wiring coming into it. So they called company Q, which called me back and set up a tech call.
A few days later, the technician showed up and I briefly explained the problem. I told him when the problem started happening, and he knew exactly what it was without even looking at anything. Apparently I had the old Central Office-based (CO) DSL service. He said they recently started running the new Fiber-to-the-Node DSL service in my neighborhood, and the “ipdata cabinet” from that was interfering with the signals of the old CO DSL services. (I later learned they term this issue “Signal Disparity”.) They had been experiencing this issue a lot and their solution was to cut people over to the new fiber service, for the same price. So he was all ready to do that for me.
However, I had learned before from researching DSL speed upgrades that company Q does not partner with independent Internet Service Providers for their fiber service. There are various reasons for this, but it depends on who you talk to. I use an independent ISP for my DSL. In fact, that’s one of the things that initially attracted me to DSL over cable for Internet: I wanted to be able to keep my old dialup ISP, not to mention the e-mail address that goes with it. I asked the tech if upgrading meant I would lose my ISP and he didn’t think so. But then he called a buddy and confirmed that was indeed the case. I asked if there were any other solution to this problem and everyone said No. If I wanted to stay with DSL, I would lose my ISP. If I didn’t switch to the fiber service, the problem would just keep getting worse as more and more people were added to the fiber line. What was I to do?
Stay tuned for the answer in the next blog entry. This one is getting too long and my attention is wandering, as yours must be too.
Latre.
Jogged Today: Yes (@ 52°F)
Songs That Came Up On The iPod While Jogging:
- “Dream World” (Midnight Oil)
- “Cold Blooded” (Engine 88)
- “You And Me” (Mitch Easter)
- “The Vanishing Spies” (Frank Black)
- “Wonder Story” (Bill Nelson)
- “1985″ (Richard Thompson)
- “Here It Goes Again” (OK Go)
- “Black Star” (Radiohead)
Poignant Search Term Of The Day That Led To This Blog: “50 reasons why i’m a bad friend”.
Videogame(s) Played Recently: LittleBigPlanet (PS3), Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia (DS)
Comments
6 Responses to “Signal To Noise”
November 18th, 2008 @ 9:19 pm
You uploaded your consciousness to the web and left your body as an abandoned meatcase?
November 18th, 2008 @ 10:29 pm
Can your brother-in-law get me a job at Qeast? I could be one of the overseas guys who tells you it’s your computer and not the DSL that’s going awry.
November 18th, 2008 @ 10:50 pm
Sounds like a scheme to drive all the independent ISPs out of business.
November 18th, 2008 @ 11:18 pm
Sounds like a scheme to drive all the independent ISPs out of business.
I think that’s a large part of it. Which is crazy, because the ISPs actually end up generating a lot of extra business for Q.
November 19th, 2008 @ 4:23 pm
When I signed up for DSL through Q I couldn’t get it to work. I called Q and they told me if to call Geek Squad and hung up on me. Luckily, I had the same ISP you do and they saved the day.
November 19th, 2008 @ 6:10 pm
“Shut up and call Geek Squad”? Oh man, I’m almost OVERqualified for that job…