Rockbottom Ramblings

There is a bewildering array of telephone service available to the potential subscriber. I remember when, in this area, there was only New England Telephone, a member of the Bell system. Everything was connected by copper wires. Fiber optics was a dream, and wireless, well, that just did not exist. New England telephone morphed into Verizon, and of course, today you need to differentiate between Verizon land lines and Verizon cell phones.

I want a Verizon cell tower next door to me, or even on my property. I need to communicate, and the Verizon cell coverage in Gleasondale is either spotty or non-existent. I walk around the house with an automobile cell antenna in my hand that plugs into a jack on the back of my cell phone. I place the antenna in a window and pray for two signal bars. OK, it looks stupid—walking around the house with an antenna and cable in your hand, and it’s only marginally effective, but it works.

I need two signal bars to make a cell phone call. Normally, I have only one bar, but that good enough for text messages—a technology I adopted from kids and drug dealers. We in Gleasondale live in cell phone heck. Hey, Verizon, can you hear me now? I have been told that Verizon owns space at the top of the Gleasondale Mill chimney. C’mon Verizon, get a transponder on that chimney. As Larry the Cable Guy would exclaim, “Let’s git-r-done!”

My overall plan is to reduce, not eliminate, my Verizon land line. Why reduce, you ask? Why not eliminate? Because cell phone technologies are unreliable in an emergency, and if you want emergency services, you want a wire running to your house. How many times has the power gone off, but the telephone service remained intact? It takes something mighty catastrophic to knock the phone system down. Hurricane Katrina demonstrated all it takes is a big windstorm (ok, a force 5 hurricane), and the cell phone service was crippled. A big windstorm here, and cell service gets really nervous.

Vonage, the Internet phone company with the cute TV ads, claims to be out to change our world. This past week they certainly changed mine. I took a fast passage to somewhere in India. Vonage uses a technology called VOIP (pronounced voy-ip). They use part of the bandwidth of the cable signal—yep, to take advantage of this voice technology, you need cable.

I make extensive use of my Comcast Internet service and have only basic television service. Comcast has an interesting pricing structure that makes it more expensive to have only Internet service. Well, cable TV gives me the ability to tape the Selectman’s meetings. I take perverse joy in being able to fast forward through parts of the meeting. Some of the more animated selectmen look sort of funny as they twitch until I hit play.

Several days after ordering the Vonage phone system, it arrived in a brown box on my door step. I opened the box. It looked like a Linksys router—which of course it was, with the exception of two RJ-11 telephone jacks on the side of the router. To my dismay, it came with a large instruction book and a blue CAT-5 cable. Since I know a little bit about everything, I tossed the instruction book aside and plugged it in according to the way I thought things should be plugged in. Gosh, that was successful. I managed to take my existing Wi-Fi network down so badly it required me power cycling (that’s a technical term for unplugging everything for thirty seconds and then plugging everything back in) two routers, one access point, one print server, and the cable modem.

With that lesson under my belt, I unfolded the “Quick Start” instructions and started with the instruction labeled, “Read this first.” A few more unsuccessful tries, and a few more failures, forced me to dial the dreaded customer support number, which whisked me to India. Again, a few more tries and a few more failures, and after power cycling all the routers, print servers, cable modems, and access points, I was transferred to someone in Advanced Technical Support. After nearly two hours on the telephone, I gave up for the day.

The next day found me again calling the customer support number. “Hello, James. I see you were here yesterday. I see you were sent to our advanced technical support. Let me transfer you there right now.” I could tell I was a hot potato. I don’t know how bad my problem was, or how annoyed I had to sound, but I was transferred to John. John was good-- really good, and in very few minutes he told me the problem was with my cable provider. “Jim, normally your uplink speeds from your cable provider should be around 340 kilobits per second. The tests demonstrated you have a total available bandwidth of 40 kilobits per second. A Vonage line needs 90 kilobits per second. Jim, there is something wrong with the cable. Call your cable provider.”

I called Comcast. I like Comcast. I find their customer support people, especially their Internet networking support people, excellent. A few tests later, we determined there was a problem with the cable. A repairman was scheduled the next morning. The technician was there promptly at 9:00 am. He quickly diagnosed that my cable modem was choking my uplink speeds, and he replaced the offending device. I am pleased to report my Comcast experience was excellent. My routers were happy. My Vonage telephone system was happy. My access point was happy, and my print server was happy. My whole network was happy. I was happy.

I learned there are several online sites that offer free diagnostics for either cable or DSL users. One is http://testmy.net, and the other is www.dslreports.com/tools. It is important to benchmark the performance of your network and to report suspected problems to your cable or DSL provider.