Comments on: Excuse Me‽

By: Bryan

Bryan — Thu, 14 Aug 2014 19:14:57 +0000

Around here the duopoly leases their modem and routers to customers, so I buy my own rather than paying for them twice a year at the current lease rate. They complain that they can’t support other peoples modems and I counter that they can’t support their own weird off-brands, so there is no difference, except I can get a replacement faster than they would supply one.

The biggest difference with my current connection is that they can’t do the circuit testing that is possible with DSL. They had to add a dummy load to my cable because there aren’t enough customers in my area to bring it down to reasonable levels, so I have a very strong signal and brand new cable coming into the house.

I use my own security software because the ‘free security software’ offered by the ISP is bloated, slow, and not as comprehensive as Eset. It was the winner of a low bid contract, and as a freebie is worth everything you paid for it.

By: Kryten42

Kryten42 — Thu, 14 Aug 2014 10:33:15 +0000

Yeah, What Badtux said! And if it’s a custom configured unit from your ISP, you should get the updates from them. Though they will usually be a 1 or 2 releases behind the manufacturer. I always see what changes the ISP had made to the manufacturer’s firmware if possible.

I just went through all this, as I said in another comment. 🙂 After several phone calls and arguments, they finally sent a decent unit! One of my problems was that we are supposed to have NBN in this area sometime in the next year, and the pub has a 2 year contract with them So I (reasonably I thought) said they needed to send a router/modem that had fibre support and was NBN compliant (knowing that the only one they had was their top of the line VoIP model)! The account manager agreed (after I also pointed out that in a busy pub, you don’t want to have an unhappy client telling lot’s of customers you suck!) LOL

It’s Chinese made of course, but reviews seem quite good. 🙂 Finally arrived yesterday, and wasn’t hard to setup. Though the Admin web interface leaves something to be desired as usual! ‘Magical mystery tour’ type I/F, you know? Everything is their, just in weird places! EG. you would think that to change the admin default password would be under ‘Security’! Hah! Nope! How about ‘Advanced -> Administration Settings’? NOPE! Took me a good 15 min’s to find it. Stupid.

The unit has a Media server built in with 2 USB ports for HDD’s, a print server, 2 VoIP/DECT ports, 4x Gigabit LAN & 1 WAN port, and 600Mbps Wireless N & Dual Band Wireless AC (claimed 1.3 Gbps, though reality differs somewhat!) 😉 😀 The range on it sux, but I have a couple range extenders (though only for Wireless N, which is all we use here anyway). Will be some time before we use AC I think. 🙂

Good luck!

By: Badtux

Badtux — Thu, 14 Aug 2014 07:04:35 +0000

Make sure you download all possible drivers and firmware updates for your router and firewall before you start messing with your connection infrastructure too… when the solution to the problem is “update the firmware in your router” well.

By: Steve Bates

Steve Bates — Tue, 12 Aug 2014 04:51:32 +0000

@Shirt, this gal was human; specifically, she was Indian. Near the end of the conversation, she asked pro forma whether there was anything else she could help me with. Trying to lighten the tense tone of the dialogue to that point, I said yes, please send me a bowl of yellow curry; she laughed (sort of), and when the bill came, that yellow curry (never delivered) cost me about 20 bucks. The same curry is available in Houston for about $5 at a hole-in-the-wall family restaurant; the curry is excellent and there are probably 30 or more Indian restaurants to choose from. Maybe AT&T's software help technicians eat hardware instead?

By: Bryan

Bryan — Tue, 12 Aug 2014 01:47:18 +0000

In reply to Steve Bates.

I know what you mean, Steve, as that was the ‘customer service’ level at my provider, and I figured out how to get bumped to the network engineering level where the real testing and expertise resided. The ‘customer service’ people were often unaware of recent network outages, which were the cause of my problems.

Yeah, Shirt, they were texting the equivalent of the menu system at my DSL provider that walked you through a reboot of the computer and modem before you got to talk to a person. Depending on your responses at various points in the process you got different scripts. It was an annoying way to spend cell phone minutes.

By: Shirt

Shirt — Mon, 11 Aug 2014 20:43:44 +0000

@Steve

I ran into a real funny with AT&T. While talking to their chat problem solvers I realized they were less than human. I mean, not at all human. The “person” you are chatting with is a computer program. It is the voice response system ran thru a program into the cable to appear as text on your computer. They do misdirect you a bit by grammatical errors that you might attribute to a foreign based chat room. But it’s not.

By: Steve Bates

Steve Bates — Mon, 11 Aug 2014 16:26:23 +0000

You are right, of course, but even telephone support for a ‘net connection can be a problem. I once reached a person at AT&T who couldn’t distinguish hers from a hole in the ground, who could follow a script but not go even one step beyond it. Foolishly I tried to walk her through a demonstration that her “solution” was no solution; she got mad at me, and though I was unfailingly polite and so was she, she still charged me for the “free” service. In the end, the bastards always win.