For the past five days I’ve been without internet service once again. This has been happening more and more frequently. I’ve been using the same ISP for a long while now, but I’ve just about reached the end of the rope. It’s not just the frequent loss of service that bothers me — while annoying, it usually comes back up after several minutes or a couple of hours. The biggest problem is the ridiculous amount of time it takes them to send a techie out for the instances when one is needed.
Saturday night things started going quirky. My wife and I have an internet phone that runs through the cable modem, part of the same service. Saturday night, every time we picked up the phone to make a call, the internet service would go out. It would come back on upon hanging up. Since it never does any good to call customer support over the weekend, we decided to wait until Monday.
Sunday evening, I was gearing up to do some fairly time-consuming work online when I lost internet service completely. When it didn’t come back after three hours, I got worried. I swapped out the power adapter for the cable modem just in case that was the problem, but no dice (I nearly always check that now, as a faulty adapter caused problems once). Aside from powering the modem off and on, there was nothing else I could do on my end. So I hoped that it would either come back up the next day, or that they could get a techie out here quickly enough to check it out.
Monday morning my wife placed the call to tech support (I speak Korean well enough, but I’m by no means fluent — lower chance of misunderstandings when my wife handles this stuff). The response was underwhelming. Apparently, there were some issues with our district. They told her that they might be able to get a techie out to us this week, but more likely it would be some time next week. Knowing how I would respond, my wife checked with another service provider to see when they could send someone out to get us hooked up — Monday was the response. So she called our current provider up again and said that we would cancel. The CS rep tried to talk her out of it. So my wife told her that if they could send someone out before Monday, we would keep the service. Otherwise, we would cancel and sign up with a competitor. The CS rep promised that someone would be out Friday.
So I spent the next several days with no internet service. On one hand, it sucked because I couldn’t check my email, update my blogs or work on some projects unless I went to a PC room. On the other hand, I was tremendously focused on work that didn’t require internet access. As a result, I didn’t go to a PC room at all. I decided to wait and catch up with everything when service was restored.
Today, Friday, dawned and I spent most of the day recovering from a hangover. The morning passed into noon and there was no techie. Two o’clock came and went. Then three. I was getting antsy. Finally, around 4:30, the guy showed up. An hour later, he left and I had a new cable modem and restored internet service. I started in on my email and then on a newsgroup I regularly read. By 6:30, I had lost service again.
To say I was angry wouldn’t justify what I was feeling when the connection suddenly went dead. I called my wife and told her to cancel right now. A few minutes later, I realized that there were no lights at all flashing on the new modem. Usually, when the service is down the power and PC lights are still on. On a whim, I replaced the brand new power adapter on the brand new cable modem with a spare one. You could probably hear my sigh of relief in Texas. All the lights came on, service was back up. I called my wife again and, luckily, she hadn’t canceled yet.
So now I’m back up, but it’s getting on into Friday night. I have to teach for a few hours tomorrow morning and then my wife and I are heading to her parents’ house for the weekend. I’m still drained from the hangover, so I doubt I’ll get anything significant done tonight. Sunday evening, when we come back home, I guess I’ll be busy.
Technorati Tags: internet, ISP, network, networking
Post a Comment