First World Problems: Going on 4th day without ISP service
13ISP went down on Friday afternoon. 45 minutes on the phone with Delhi, but no success. Referred to Service/Repair. No service window available until Tuesday between 8:15am-7:15pm.
It’s amazing how much I’ve come to rely on being connected. My video surveillance system, video doorbell, garage door opener, even my HVAC thermostat… I’ve come to rely on the mobile cloud based services to monitor and control these devices. Not to mention the convenience/entertainment factor (streaming, browsing, shopping, email, posting inane comments in the meh forum…)
This challenge is more difficult than I’m comfortable admitting to myself.
/giphy withdrawal symptoms
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It could be worse. It could be slow internet.
http://theoatmeal.com/comics/no_internet
We had this ISP down issue for an extended time and believe it or not, AT&T Uverse agreed to credit our AT&T mobile service for tethering our home stuff to our phones.
This was back when we had a mobile plan we knew could not handle that bit-volume. As I recall they put us on an unlimited mobile plan for the time our land Internet was down.
Was a pleasant surprise even tho we weren’t happy about the service interruption.
I think AT&T Uverse customer service has since taken a step backward. Although I sympathize with those agents being forced to hard sell DirecTV to drag folks off Uverse TV.
Bah. CenturyLink tech came this morning. He had to refer the problem to their “cable group”. He suspects an underground break in the cable somewhere in the 1,500 feet separating my house from the DSLAM. If they have to lay new cable it will be 3 to 5 weeks. Baaaah.
/giphy poopy
“Me? Oh, I’m the inventor of the famous Poopy Puppy novelty firework” admitted nobody ever.
@ruouttaurmind That firework is great! Too many hot peppers will do that to ya.
Sorry about your Internet, though.
@djslack
/giphy Montezuma’s revenge
giphy, you are totally useless!
@ruouttaurmind Ouch. Gonna take more than a few months of service for them to make that repair payback if they have to drag a new 1,500 foot line!
/giphy Montezuma’s revenge (but do it right, giphy!)
giphy, you kissass!
@RedOak City permits, street diversions, demo the street and sidewalk, run cable… they’d probably be better off to pay me to switch to Cox Cable! LOL!
@ruouttaurmind Well you might suggest that they let you out of the contract - wait until they agree to credit your account for the outage though… - and then tell them to notify you when they are done with the work for you to switch back, after getting them to agree to pay any contract breaking fees you have with Cox. All in writing of course before you take any action.
@ruouttaurmind Five weeks? I think I’d move before then.
@cinoclav I get 2GB of data with my mobile service. Less than a week now since the DSL went down and I’ve already used 1.2GB. And I’ve been restricting my usage. There’s no way I can make a full month without some kind of plan B. I’ll probably be spending a lot of time at Starbucks, Denny’s and McDonalds this weekend sucking up the free wifi.
@ruouttaurmind That’s painful. My work wifi is so bad and they have so many restrictions on it I don’t even bother with it anymore. I went from upgrading my mobile from 2GB to 6GB and just recently to unlimited. The extra $20 a month is well worth not worrying about going over my limit and having them throttle my speed down to 2G (which happened once and was miserable). I have FIOS at home and we used to have issues with the neighbor’s trees falling in storms and taking out the lines. I think the longest I went was about 3 days without any service. Fortunately Verizon tends to favor their FIOS customers and got to it way faster than the DSL users.
@ruouttaurmind
can you temporarily change your cell plan to unlimited?
@f00l I switched to Mint SIM in February. I have a 2GB data allowance. I can add more at $20/3GB, but they don’t offer an unlimited plan. I pre-paid for 1 yr. to get my service for about $13/mo. Of course at the time I never imagined I’d ever bump the data limit because my home service would be hampered for weeks or months.
No Internet?!
My apartment requires no internet to operate the door, fridge, stove, shower or toilet, and I like it that way.
StarCraft 2, on the other hand, has no meaningful purpose w/o internet, so that’s my weak link…
@UncleVinny It’s COD for me.
Good news/bad news.
The cable repair folks visited today and were able to downgrade my service from bonded ADSL to a single line ADSL, and got me up and running.
The bad news: they downgraded me from bonded ADSL to single line ADSL, theoretically cutting my bandwidth in half (but effectively cutting it by more than half). I now have about 5MB down and .5MB up. With a roommate who streams basically 20 hours a day. Netflix, Hulu, Prime Video, Dish on Demand, and YouTube. One of those are constantly going on at any given time.
The other bad news: they are projecting 45 to 60 days for a completed repair. If they are projecting 45-60, the real world tells me it may be up to 90 days.
I say “since you’ve got to run new cable anyway, does this mean I’ll have access to the higher tier service levels?” (higher bandwidth). Nope. They’ll basically just be running another copper pair, just like the original 35 year old cable.
So, ya, definitely time to shop out a new carrier I guess. I really prefer it when stuff just works and I don’t have to think about it.
@ruouttaurmind Drastic times call for drastic measures. Get rid of the roommate.
@Barney I like the way you think.
/giphy I like the way you think.
@ruouttaurmind It’s the universe telling you to change things. Mercury is retrograde, so I am told. You probably have termites in your underground cables, too.
@OldCatLady I agree. I’ve been feeling stagnated anyway. Time to stir things up a bit.
@ruouttaurmind Does your router support QoS (quality of service)? If so you may be able to prioritize your devices so that you can still internet okay regardless of roommate’s streaming.
@djslack My CenturyLink router has a simple “on-off” QoS capability, but it cannot apply rules to specific devices, only specific services.
I recently installed a Linksys router which claimed to have a device priority feature. I enabled the plug-n-play profile for this feature, but didn’t notice much difference.
I need to spend some time creating a customized profile for my PC, tablet and Fire TV stick, but that requires knowledge that’s currently a bit above my pay grade. I’ll need to educate myself on TCP/IP and UDP protocols just a bit before I can bodge together a useful QoS profile for each device.
@ruouttaurmind I feel your pain- I am currently without a cellphone, and it has made some of my daily routine a little more interesting than it needs to be.
@dashcloud I would happily give up my mobile in exchange for fast, seamless ISP service. Last I checked, my monthly usage average was around 20 minutes talk, 30 txt, 150mb data. If it wasn’t for the occasional work crisis I wouldn’t even own a mobile phone.
Could you ask your roommate to watch things off the hopper when you need internet? (Never had a hopper but it is my understanding the hopper stores shows locally).
@caffeine_dude Yup, Hopper is a DVR. Mine has a 2TB HDD; plenty of room for the 300+ movies I’ve recorded and intend to watch. Some day.
I’ve tried to explain the difference between streaming, downloading, and recording on the Hopper, but being totally non-technical, he struggles to grasp when each capability should be used. He’s between jobs right now, so he’s pretty much always here. I’ve encouraged him to set DVR recording schedules to record shows/movies during the day, do his streaming when I’m at work, then watch DVR recordings in the evenings. He still struggles to grasp what seems to be a complex idea for him.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Reading this has made it even more tempting to get a second ISP setup on the house so I can fail-over when the first one goes down.
Of course, I don’t have cloud-anything for most of my devices at home.
@kazriko Hotspot on a phone is a suitable failover for temporary situations I suppose. I was able to rely on it for some work stuff when my service was totally down.
Most of my “cloud enabled” devices continue to function without connectivity, I was just unable to use my phone to control them. For example, the thermostat continued to function as normal, I just had to be in front of it to adjust the temperature. Garage door opener, lamp controls, etc, same deal.
The exceptions were my video based equipment like the video doorbell, and of course streaming TV devices. My security cameras continued to monitor/record, but without notifications they’re essentially useless.