Wave Broadband CSRs have been much less than helpful. Seems to be par these days.
After numerous phone calls, I finally got someone to admit that they really wanted to bury a new coax cable, and their contractor is running three weeks out to do it. I blew my top. I'm not having the front lawn ripped up for a year for a new cable. We traded messages back & forth, and basically I told them that they're fired.
Then they got all nice again, with a higher-up calling and asking if there's anything they can do to make it right, promising to not hurt our lawn too much, etc. We said forget it: the bad CSR experience killed them for us.
We ordered a Frontier DSL reconnect -- the outfit we'd had for years prior to dumping landline & DSL in January. We're supposed to be able to get 25/3 ADSL service up here (according to the banner at the remote DSLAM building at the bottom of the hill), but during ordering they said 15/2 was the best tier they could do. OK, the price is nowhere near competitive with Wave for similar service, but we're done with Wave, so -- go ahead, I said.
The fun begins.
In retrospect, and with a lot of reading online, I find that we apparently can't get / don't have VDSL here. In order to get 15Mbs service, Frontier's using "bonded DSL", which uses two phone lines (four wires) to send two separate DSL circuits to my home, and a special DSL modem that aggregates those to a single ethernet port.
So my existing DSL equipment is obsolete for this. OK . . . I let them rent me a DSL modem that does this magic. What's another $8/mo. for that, when I just blew $100 on the cable modem that I've only used for two months (a very nice Motorola Surfboard SB6121, DOCSIS 3.0) that I won't be using.
This bonded DSL service
requires a tech come out. Understandable, since they don't know if out house phone lines are (still) wired for two lines. But the techs that know how to do bonded DSL are rare, so the soonest I could get an appt for a service call was ten days out. Sigh.
Meanwhile, the Wave modem is retraining several times a day, giving service dropouts. It's not the modem, it's the line signal.
The DSL install day comes. The tech does his thing at the TNI box, making certain we've got decent signal at the house interface, then he comes inside. I am prepared: I know where
my telephone wiring meets the house's wiring.
Sidebar: modern houses aren't very wired: they're designed assuming that most things will be wireless (I hate wireless). This place was built in '96 and has exactly
two phone jacks: one in the kitchen, one in the master bedroom. Any other phone is deemed to be wireless. Some previous owner had somehow grafted at least two other extension lines in, neither to my "server room". We're using very good older AT&T wireless phones, so the lack of house wiring didn't really apply until I moved in and had to get a hard line to the server room. I put two more jacks in the walls: one in the dining room (which we use as a home office, for the fax machine) and one in the server room. All wiring in-wall or in the crawl-space, very nicely done.
So, I know where to check for the second line, and I point to the places that I know about.
Tech's tone gizmo doesn't find signal
anywhere. Sigh. He removes all three jacks from the walls (my two, and the original in the kitchen), makes a lot of "hmmm, ah" sounds, and after putting it all back together, realizes it's his tester that's bad. Sigh.
He plugs in the modem, looks at my table of servers, switchgear, and about a hundred LEDs blinking, and asks where to patch in the ethernet. I point to the lone laptop (old Sony VAIO) sitting at the end of the bench, and tell him to plug into that ONLY, and we'll run speedtest.net to verify line speed.
Meanwhile, a Wave Broadband tech arrives. He removes the cable from across the flower bed & lawn. Now, we haven't officially cancelled service yet, so I'm curious what's going on, but I'm fully occupied supervising the Frontier tech in my server room (no, I'm not leaving him alone in there!), so I send my partner out to the curb to find out what's going out out there.
Back in the server room, lots of trouble with the new modem, but he does eventually get it up and speedtest tells me that I'm getting almost 10/1. I complain, tech says that's what we're gonna get, as we're 7000' from the DSLAM.
Now, we were paying $20 less per month for 8/1 service and getting around 6/0.5. $240 more per year for about 20% better throughput is not a bargain. I send him away, vowing to think about this more when some emotion has drained off.
Everyone packs up & leaves, and I get some info about Wave from my partner. It seems (the tech says) that we don't need a new, buried cable after all, and tech doesn't know why we were told that. He ascribes all our problems on their team working in the area to fix up deferred Verizon maintenace (Frontier bought all of Verizon's landline business three years ago; we were Verizon before that). "All your problems with cable should be solved now." Uh huh.
I test the cable speeds, and -- loaded -- they're still crap. At least it's working, though.
Over the next week, I ignored the DSL line, because
a) it's slow,
b) The DSL modem is a POS, and
c) The cable service did actually improve.
Speedtest showed ping times under 10ms and speeds actually a bit over what was provisioned, which is odd because DOCSIS 3.0 doesn't allow that. But, it was working and I had other fires to put out, so I left it alone.
Until two days ago, when we had yet another 30 minute outage. And again yesterday. I called for that one, since it was during business hours. "Yes," the CSR said, "we do have an outage in your area. No ETA to fix."
It came back in 10 minutes, but last night the logs show more outages that lasted more than a few minutes, so today was officially "move back to DSL" day. Oh, goody.
I re-investigated the POS DSL modem. What is is, is an Frontier-branded Actiontec FV2200. Go
Google "Actiontec FV2200". You won't find any info on it that's useful. No manual. No service guide. No "Quick Start". Nothing. It gets better.
This thing, like most appliances these days, has a built-in web server that you use to configure it. And, it took me two hours to discover:
that web server doesn't work with Firefox. Can you imagine? Not using standards-compliant web code in an appliance? It wasn't obvious that the browser was the problem, but this thing just would
not configure -- and it would not fail to configure in a repeatable way -- until I switched to IE. Eventually, I came up with a set of port forwards that would work.
Switching from cable broadband to DSL broadband: For consumer users of broadband, this ain't so hard. On my house router, I literally unplugged one cable (to the cable modem) and plugged it to the DSL modem. The house router is smart -- very smart -- and it discovers all the stuff it needs all by itself in about 45 seconds, and suddenly the house is now on DSL instead of cable internet.
But.
I have lots and lots of outbound services, and these have to be reconfigured now that they're on a different network (ISP). The worst one is this forum. It has to send email every time someone has subscribed to a thread (Send Email when a thread is updated), or one user emails another. And, as I don't run my own mail server (not in the cards: this is one area where not being completely up-to-date can kill your network and make your ISP and the feds very angry with you), I have to tell this forum software to use my new ISP's mail server. And the things that this forum software wants to know are not always things that your ISP wants to tell you (or that its CSRs even know exist).
That was about three more hours this morning/afternoon, and four phone calls to Frontier to get sorted.
As I like to say, "It seems to be working now."
It's definitely time for lunch. TTFN.
So, while I could send email from home using the "away" security & port settings, the forum couldn't.
