More Internet Speed

I now have a better internet service. And it only took 20 days to get it.  Originally I had service with Bellsouth which later was taken over by AT&T. Paying close to $50 a month for 3 MB a minute but only getting less than 1 MB was becoming a real pain. Kids complaining they couldn’t play online games, a wife who had to wait to watch computer generated men do choreographic dancing. And I had to wait a long time for my “educational videos” to download.

On June 26^th I went to the Time Warner office and signed up and paid all the fees for the internet service. By the 29^th while I was at work, the service technician showed up and wanted the money for the instillation. My wife was a bit nervous and called me. The Time Warner employee stated that he couldn’t call his boss to clarify that I had paid already. I had to do this.

He left to go do another job and within a few minutes a Time Warner representative called me to reschedule the appointment.  I inform the lady on the phone that I had already paid but she could not verify this as her only job was to schedule appointments. She gave me the number to call another Time Warner employee who fixed the problem by unchecking the COD (cash on delivery) box.

On July 2^nd the second Time Warner visiting technician shows up a little late. Upon looking over the information I gave the customer service people on June 26^th , when I first signed up for service, he stated that he couldn’t do anything until a new cable line was installed. Seeing as the old cable line was cut when a water line was connected to our house.

He left quickly as another Time Warner employee called to set up another appointment to install internet service. I had to wait until July 11^th for the third Time Warner technician to come out to my home again and install cable line and internet service. I was still mellow on how this was going as my wife was pulling hairs trying to figure out why it was taking so long to hookup a cable to a computer.

By July 9^th a two man crew, out of the blue, shows up by 5 PM to start burying a new cable from our house to the main box across the street. And I must say they were very good at not hitting any of the water lines running through our yard. Leading up to July 11^th on a Wednesday afternoon, almost two hours passed the appointment time, the third Time Warner technician shows up and the fun really begins as he needed my help to install the cable connection.

As there was already a place to run the cable line under our house and into the livingroom, this technician was having a problem with getting underneath the house. The 29 inch (73.6 centimeter) doorway leading underneath the house was too small for him. Also to get to the opening behind the TV set, I had to move the TV stand and everything else out of the way so he could work the cable line into the room.

An hour or so later as he spent most of it outside doing something out of my view I finally had internet service. A bit slow at first but a huge difference as the evening went on. My boys were amazed at how fast they could log in and play Cartoon Network Fusion Fall. My wife loved seeing her videos without it pausing every 5 seconds. And I quickly downloaded within a minute an “educational video” for my enjoyment.

But with this new internet speed we all went back to doing what we usually do. Two boys playing Lego Batman 2, my wife reading the internet news and I’m watching a multitude of Top Gear episodes that I copied off of TV while at the same time watching an episode of Tokumei Sentai Go-Busters on the computer.

But all was not right in our little world. By the next day we kept getting error messages and blank screens stating we had no connection to the internet. The lights on our Ubee router looked more like a CB scanner than a router box as all the lights just kept flashing to the point my two boys started singing Christmas songs.  And for once my wife was very grateful that I forgot to call AT&T to cancel out internet service.

And so I called Time Warner Thursday afternoon and after talking with the computer system on how to restore internet service, I proceeded to repeat for the tenth time of unplugging cables and power connections, restarting my computer and cleaning out all cashes and trashes. Luckily when I called back I pressed enough buttons and was able to talk to a live human being with a wonderful accent.

She was really smart for she quickly found out by pinging and other techniques that my router was not working properly. DUH! All this time I thought it was solar storms, gov’t eaves dropping unto my line or UFO aliens trying to phone home. Of course I didn’t say those things to her. Just grunted like a man who was waiting to hear when I will have to wait for a technician to bring me a new router box to keep my wife from giving me the skunk eye.

Till then I hooked up the AT&T router and everyone is surfing again. That is till I got home Friday afternoon from work and hooked up the broken router from Time Warner and nobody is surfing and my wife is looking at me but not in the good way. But lo and behold I get a phone call at 7:30 PM, just slightly outside the 5 to 7 PM timeline I was told when someone was to be here to fix it, saying they would be there to fix it by 8 PM.

The 4^th Time Warner technician arrives and immediately gets to work checking the cable line first. And sure enough he figures that the buried cable could have been damaged during the burial process. He calls it in to his boss as we told that we will have to wait a few more days for a new line to be buried in our yard again. But this man decides to not give up and soon he wants to try one more thing before he leaves for the night.

A very small cable piece connecting the buried cable to the one coming into our house turns out to be the damaged part and within a few minutes everything is working like new. The router is working better than ever as none of the lights are blinking me into a seizure.  And as my wife is told that the internet is working properly again, she disappears back into the bedroom fast than lightning to surfing the internet again: for at least a day.

By the next day many web sites weren’t loading up completely. Sometimes error messages saying there was a DNS error. After a long search on the web I finally found the reason for web sites not loading up, constant error messages and downloads taking longer than usual. I had too many active firewalls.

Our Time Warner box has a firewall as does the software we installed into our computer to protect it. And once I turned off the firewall in the Time Warner box, the internet really opened up for us. We were getting speeds faster than what we were paying for. I had downloaded a full movie while watching commercials on TV. As for the firewall issues, I found out my firewall software is way better than Time Warner’s version.

Now I just need to get the kids off the computer so I can use it.