Communications Breakdown II
We last left our hero bright-eyed and bristling with excitement at the prospect of a new communications setup. Now, all he has to do is cut his phone service and get on with his life...
And it was looking like that would likely be the case in the initial stages. I gave my company a call and poled my way through the canals of their automated menu system and ended up speaking with a rather nice gentleman.
He asked me how he could help and I replied that I would like to discontinue all of my services except for my DSL line. He complied by passing me off to their "loyalty officer." Nice term and I began to wonder if I would get the third degree in my attempts to curtail my service.
However, this new guy was also amiable and walked me through the steps to discontinue the service. Once we took care of the phone we started chatting about my DSL service, which I wanted to keep. As we talked about tiers of service, I decided to bump mine up a notch because it really wasn't that much more expensive than what I had.
The conversation started to go South when he asked me which ISP I wanted to use. I told him that I didn't want one since I've moved my email requirements to a web-based platform. To his credit, he did try to accomodate my request, but in the end they were going to screw me out of another ten bucks a month for what was, in essence, an email address.
We finalize the arrangments and he tells me the changes would become active on the 19th. Fine by me, that is, until the 19th arrived...
When I got home I found that they had left some software for me. Hmm...
I went in to find that my phone was off (yay), but also that my computer was no longer connected to the internet (grrr).
So I reasoned that I needed to install this new software in order to reconfigure my connections. Right? Installed the disk and followed its instructions and rebooted my machine. Still getting a message that my connection is failing.
I left it to sit while I took care of some yardwork in the hopes that it would miraculously correct itself while I was gone. Nope. I checked connections and settings and then decided that I should call the tech line.
When I finally got a human, it became apparently very quickly that she was not going to be overly insightful or helpful to my problem. I described what I could, saying that the modem was working fine, but that I was having some sort of connection problem leading me to believe that there was some configuration settings that I must have missed.
After a couple of minutes of fruitless checking, I happened to hit the refresh on my browser and my homepage actually loaded up. Fancy that. I cut loose the tech worker thinking that it just needed a little extra time to work out some of its problems and proceeded to do my normal home browsing thing.
This is where it became apparent that the problem was still existent. It seems as though my modem can connect to the internet, but it cannot sustain it. The effect of which is that the first time I try to load a page, it fails. The second time, it gets it done. With what rudimentary connectivity I had, I tried to identify and fix my problem to no great success.
At the end of the night, I decided it would be easier to cut bait and rig with something different.
And it was looking like that would likely be the case in the initial stages. I gave my company a call and poled my way through the canals of their automated menu system and ended up speaking with a rather nice gentleman.
He asked me how he could help and I replied that I would like to discontinue all of my services except for my DSL line. He complied by passing me off to their "loyalty officer." Nice term and I began to wonder if I would get the third degree in my attempts to curtail my service.
However, this new guy was also amiable and walked me through the steps to discontinue the service. Once we took care of the phone we started chatting about my DSL service, which I wanted to keep. As we talked about tiers of service, I decided to bump mine up a notch because it really wasn't that much more expensive than what I had.
The conversation started to go South when he asked me which ISP I wanted to use. I told him that I didn't want one since I've moved my email requirements to a web-based platform. To his credit, he did try to accomodate my request, but in the end they were going to screw me out of another ten bucks a month for what was, in essence, an email address.
We finalize the arrangments and he tells me the changes would become active on the 19th. Fine by me, that is, until the 19th arrived...
When I got home I found that they had left some software for me. Hmm...
I went in to find that my phone was off (yay), but also that my computer was no longer connected to the internet (grrr).
So I reasoned that I needed to install this new software in order to reconfigure my connections. Right? Installed the disk and followed its instructions and rebooted my machine. Still getting a message that my connection is failing.
I left it to sit while I took care of some yardwork in the hopes that it would miraculously correct itself while I was gone. Nope. I checked connections and settings and then decided that I should call the tech line.
When I finally got a human, it became apparently very quickly that she was not going to be overly insightful or helpful to my problem. I described what I could, saying that the modem was working fine, but that I was having some sort of connection problem leading me to believe that there was some configuration settings that I must have missed.
After a couple of minutes of fruitless checking, I happened to hit the refresh on my browser and my homepage actually loaded up. Fancy that. I cut loose the tech worker thinking that it just needed a little extra time to work out some of its problems and proceeded to do my normal home browsing thing.
This is where it became apparent that the problem was still existent. It seems as though my modem can connect to the internet, but it cannot sustain it. The effect of which is that the first time I try to load a page, it fails. The second time, it gets it done. With what rudimentary connectivity I had, I tried to identify and fix my problem to no great success.
At the end of the night, I decided it would be easier to cut bait and rig with something different.