Kevin Standlee: Fandom Is My Way of Life

Once I managed to get around the slowness of the Ethernet port on the first USB hub by attaching a second hub with an Ethernet port to one of the USB-C ports on the first hub, the next hurdle was determining why it wasn't as fast as it should be. It wasn't the connection to the house (Spectrum) which should be around 200 Mbps. My work machine, connected to the same wired network and going through the same router in the wiring closet, reported speeds near 200, but my personal machine wouldn't go much above 50. (That's download; both machines reported 20 mbps upload, which is what I expected. I was puzzled.

After much trial and error, I realized what the issue was. If you use Google Speed Test, which tests against their servers in the Bay Area, you get 200 Mbps. If you use Oookla SpeedTest, it picks the Spectrum server in Reno, and doesn't get more than 50 Mbps. So aside from the initial problem with the first hub, I have my network back up to speed.

If you tried to contact me yesterday afternoon and expected a quick answer, you did not get it, because Spectrum Internet locally went down around 4 PM local time. Aside from a brief up-time a couple of hours later, it stayed down until at least 10 PM, when I stopped waiting and went to bed because my 4:30 AM alarm was looming over me, despite a two-hour nap that afternoon.

Lisa and I spent quite a while trying to make sure that it wasn't a fault with our home network, because this not only took my computers off-line, but also the Callcentric internet telephone. Eventually I noticed the text message from Spectrum telling me about the outage, and we then relaxed. Indeed, I went outside and sat on the porch for a while instead of staring at my computer screen working on Westercon stuff.

While I did have a backup plan for Day Jobbe (use my company phone as an internet hotspot), the company does not like me doing that and usually send me nastygrams for overrunning my data allowance. In those cases, I have to explain to them that it was for company business, but I don't like having to do it. Fortunately, by the time I got back to the computer this morning, our internet was working again and I could get back to work.

This afternoon, I was very worn out and fell into bed about 2 PM. I awoke three hours later to hear lots of rushing around by Lisa. I got back up and discovered that she was working with a technician from Spectrum, our local cable/internet provider. Apparently, there was a wiring problem that they ended up tracing to our house. The problem was with the wire that ran from the wiring box on the side of the house through a hole in the wall and to our cable modem. Lisa convinced the technician that the best fix was to connect in the coax line that Lisa had installed some time ago that runs under the house and over to a wiring closet that has connections to other parts of the house. He did so, and that led to a series of other changes and repairs, all to the good.

Lisa moved the cable modem from where it had been sitting on the floor in the living room (near where the old connection entered the house) to the wiring closet. She also moved the router into which that modem fed, and then connected that the the wiring patch panel that is in that closet. Years ago, we bought a small rack panel from the long-departed-and-missed Weird Stuff Warehouse, and Lisa put in rack-mounted hardware to manage the internet wiring in this house. Wires run from the panel to various part of the house, and in particular four lines run to a four-port plug in the living room. We confirmed that we had connectivity at one of my computers, and we thanked the Spectrum technician for his help.

Now, we've been having wonky and erratic internet speed for a while now, with the speed fluctuating wildly, and the defective coax cable may well have been the main culprit, but we've also been having erratic results on the various computers connected to that four-port outlet. Lisa had had enough of this, and we went over to Lowe's and bought a cable tester. We knew that we had at least one good port of the four, and she started testing lines. It turned out that three of the four ports had either cross-wired or completely disconnected wiring. Working one port at a time, Lisa rewired the three mis-wired ports, testing after she re-punched each pair of wires. Eventually, we got every port working the way it should. Now, all three of my computers (my personal machine and the two computers I have for work — besides my company machine, our client requires I use one of their computers to access their systems, for security reasons) are getting the high speed for which we're paying.

( Wiring and Speed )

There is a whole lot of spare capacity here, which is great. As time and energy permit, Lisa can run more lines to other parts of the house, including maybe someday reaching upstairs, where we've always wanted to move my home office. Someday we hope we'll have the means to complete the upstairs office, including putting in heating/air conditioning and repairing the plumbing that the previous owner broke. But for now, we have working high-speed internet again, and the tools to repair and extend it throughout the house.

Lisa decided that I needed a connection to our home network in the bedroom, so she went to work today on creating it.

( One More Line )

I eventually will probably use one of the older computers to run an internet radio in the bedroom. We get nearly no radio reception out here in Fernley, and what stations we do receive are not the ones to which we want to listen.

Lisa has had a lot of conversations with different people at AT&T the past few days trying to get our DSL service restored.

( Background )

Lisa talked with AT&T over and over again on Saturday, but got variations on "Not until Monday" or "You'll be back online within two hours," (not true) depending on who was doing the talking. Thanks to someone on my F-list who might not want to be named, this issue got escalated to a much higher level. On Monday morning, Lisa got several calls, one of which was from an Escalation Manager, and the issue kept getting pushed higher and higher.

Just after 11 AM this morning, the unhappy red blinking light on the DSL modem finally stopped blinking red and turned solid green. We had our connection back! We started to bring Lisa's machine back online, and everything was good for a couple of minutes, and then down she went again. This time it took the voice phone line down with it. But within five minutes both the voice line and the DSL came back online, and by 11:20 everything was working again, after an eleven-day DSL outage here at Fernley House.

We got a handful of additional phone calls after this, asking to confirm that our connection was back in place and reassuring us that the U-Verse bill would be rescinded. We got a return-authorization number for the U-Verse modem (a really annoying process in itself; it took three tries to get to a human being) and mailed it back to AT&T at lunchtime today.

I'm grateful to have our internet access back; however, this should not have taken eleven days and a friend on the inside to resolve. Lisa says she's used an entire year's worth of patience as she talked with people in nine different call centers (including one in the Philippines). In general, most of the AT&T people were polite about it (except the lady in San Diego who started arguing with Lisa about U-Verse and insisting that all computers are wireless these days), but almost none of them could seem to fix it. It was an immensely frustrating experience for both Lisa and me.

The telephone service at the Fernley House was working when we tested it with Lisa's lineman's phone, although every one of the telephones from Oregon seems to have gotten lost in boxes and thus we couldn't connect a regular phone to the lines. Unfortunately, we never seem to have received the "internet starter kit" with the information we need to set up the DSL. Also, at least as of last week we didn't hear the hiss on the line that indicates that DSL is there waiting for DSL filters so you can use the line for voice as well. We didn't need equipment because Lisa's trailer already has a DSL modem from the service she had in Oregon, but we did need the starter kit so that we could enter the codes to allow us to start using the service.

As of yesterday, nothing had arrived, and I called AT&T this morning to try and figure out why. After an incredible amount of time on hold, I finally got through to at technician who told me that, "They don't send out anything anymore if you don't order the hardware. You just have to call us when you've plugged in the DSL modem and we'll talk you through the configuration over the phone." Well, it would have been nice if they'd told us that when I placed the order in the first place!

I hope that the next time I'm up there (which should be a week from this weekend because I have to work over this weekend to make up for the days I took off earlier this week), I'll be able to get this resolved, because Lisa called last night and said that the wireless card in the one computer she allowed to have a card appears to have stopped working, so she's completely cut off from the internet, meaning among other things that she can't call me on Skype nor stay in contact with her friends on ActiveWorlds.