I ignored the first two letters, but then decided I’d look into the matter.
The upgrade process started with a call to customer service. The agent went over the available tiers of service and their costs. I chose 500Mbps because I know that bottlenecks in speed occur at the server and the device. Higher speed service is good for large families that have several users and devices all vying for bandwidth, but that’s not me. (I was happy enough with 20Mbps, actually, but that was just the download speed. I was limited to about 1.6Mbps upload speed, which made teleconferencing problematic.) The 500Mbps was for both download and upload.
The agent scheduled a date and time for a technician to visit – I had to be home for this. She also looked into the details of my account and informed me that I had overhead service. This was wrong. The neighborhood had overheard wires; however my wire was (mostly) underground. But the agent was unconvinced. It didn’t matter too much; the technician would see it and correct the record.
I liked the technician. He saw the DSL wire – it was lying on the ground near the house. He pointed out that the wire was meant for overhead installations. He showed me where the fiber would come down from a different utility pole – he even pointed out that box it would connect to. So the new “wire” would need to be trenched on the other side of the property. Since the ISP didn’t realize I needed the fiber buried, he decided to expedite the order. But first, the property needed to be surveyed by the “Call Before You Dig” (CBYD) program. I did not need to be home for CBYD or for the cable to be buried. But I was glad I was present for both.
When the CBYD technician arrived, I went out to meet with him. He was puttering around the pole to which the old DSL was connected. I told him that the ISP would be digging at the other pole. Nevertheless, he indicated “No Water / No Gas” and placed flags over the electrical service. He didn’t bother to mark the cable or DSL – I guess that service doesn’t matter.
The guy came out the next day to put down the new cable. It was a rainy Sunday afternoon. I didn’t know he was there until I heard some sort of thumping and went out to investigate. He was attempting to manually dig a trench on the wrong side of the house, navigating near the cable! I explained how the installation needed to go, and he was relieved because it meant that he could use the gas-powered trench digger. He seemed not fluent in English, so he probably didn’t read the ticket. Anyway, he completed the job, and I took photos of the two exposed ends.
The technician would return on Friday, but someone still needed to connect the cable to the box on the pole. Would he do that? I hoped so.
The next day, I got a frantic text from my wife. The (VoIP) land line phone was not working. And the cellphone service was dropping her calls after 20 seconds. So she had no way to call anyone!
It turned out that the ISP canceled our service. So we were without Internet service for four days!
The weather forecast for the Friday installation day included a severe thunderstorm watch. And still the cable was not attached to the box on the pole. But eventually the guy came in the bucket truck and made the connection pretty quickly. I guess he was spurred on by the thunder clouds roiling nearby. About 30 minutes later the deluge began.
Then the technician came to put in the new modem, router and WiFi. This all went amazingly well. He even set the WiFi passcode to what it was before; I didn’t have to re-authenticate all my devices to the new WiFi. The only surprise was that I was left with no battery backup. The technician removed the old UPS, which had only 12Vdc output -- it was useless for the new system. He said he was glad to see I had my own UPS for the computer and cordless phone system, and he plugged the Modem and Router into that. Indeed, I got a message afterward alerting me to the fact that the VoIP system would not work in the event of a power failure.
I’ve had the service for several weeks. At first the Ookla speed test reported about 500Mbps for both upload and download when connected to the ISP’s own server. However, when connected to the nearest (non-ISP) server, the speed was under 30Mbps. As well, DNS lookup was problematic, and I’ve had to restart my computer prior to the start of my work-from-home day.
Voice mail was the next problem. The upgrade came with a whole new voice mail system. We opted out of the voicemail system that came with DSL As before, the new voicemail answered when our line was in use, and callers would leave messages expected that we’d hear them. We had no idea this was going on, and we missed some messages from medical providers. So I used the web interface to set the number rings before pickup to 12. But that did nothing. I needed to spend about 45 minutes over two sessions with customer service before eventually it could be disabled.
But lately, things have improved. In fact during a recent severe thunderstorm, the Internet connection remained steady even though cable and electrical power was intermittent. Wet weather would always degrade the DSL service – now this seems to be another tale of hardship we had to endure, like 9600 baud rate modems, text-based message board systems, and 1.2 MB removable media.
Lately, the speeds to local non-ISP servers have improved; although the advertised rate still isn’t being met.
