Monday, August 13, 2012

A NOS injection for teh interwebz

Who's got two thumbs and is getting FibreOP next week?

This guy! :-)

After seeing a steady degradation in my internet performance over the past few months I decided to make the call this morning.  I'm paying for Aliant's High Speed Ultra package, that promises up to 7 Megabits/second download speeds.  I say "up to" because internet speed is subjective and depends on a lot of variables, starting with your computer and going all the way to the server on the other end of the internet that hosts the page that you're trying to get to.

Lately my speeds have been sporadic at best.  Sometimes I'll go for days and not see a hitch, other days I can't keep a consistent speed.  I worked tech support for 11 years, and not to blow my own horn too much, but I know what I'm at when trying to fix the issues.  I dutifully power cycle my modem (unplug the modem, wait 30 seconds and plug it back in) reboot my computers and clear my browsers cookies/temp files/history. But it does nothing for me now.  Last night was the worst.  According to speedtest.net I was sometimes getting as much as 1.1 Megabits/second download to as little as 0.21 Megabits/second download. When the advertising speaks of "Up to" 7 Megabits/second, this is an unacceptable drop.

I've compared hardwired to wireless connections with no difference since I'm under 50 feet from the modem at any given time.  I would look at my computer for the issue but it's not just my laptop, it's the laptop, my desktop, my iPhone and iPad all seeing the same issues with inconsistent speeds.

I don't even mention my background when I call tech support cause the last thing they want to hear is "I've done your job" or "I'm a tech guy" or anything like that because it means that you're a blowhard moron who's not going to listen to anything they say.  I follow every instruction, go through every reboot, let them lead me to every place on my computer that they can think of, and it's all to no avail.

One of the last times I called the agent started asking me about the construction of my house and whether or not I knew if there were any electrical wires in the wall between me and the modem, because that can cause massive signal loss... yeah... ok...

I told her I had line of sight and even mentioned my hardwired PC that was next to the modem, but nope, she was hung up on there being interference from potentially hypothetical wires. *sigh*

Anyway, that was a bit of a rant, the point is that it's all gonna change next week.  Next week I get my shiny new FibreOP service installed.  Up to 20 Megabits/second download and 15 Megabits/second upload. Again with the "Up to" because no one in their right mind can guaranty the speeds. Regardless of that, I'm still looking forward to this.  YAY SPEEDS!

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