Backup?

Why do I have a backup internet?

When we moved into our house way back in 1995 I had a permanent dial up connection to WorldCom or some such.  It was not supposed to be a permanent connection but nobody was using the local connection point too much, so the vendor didn't care, and so I was basically dialed up 24/7, and using Windows connection sharing to get the internet through the rest of the house.

Then one day enough people were using their service so they suddenly cared and told me I couldn't be dialed up 24/7.  Luckily just then DSL service came to our neighborhood.  But just barely as we were at the outer reaches of how far those telephone lines could carry a signal. But it worked and we went from sort-of 56K on the modem to an actual 64K.  Woohoo!

Then our small local cable company laid fiber in our neighborhood - not "FTTH" (Fiber To The Home) but fiber to distribution points that then came into our home over the cable lines.

Then Comcast bought that company many moons ago and we've had Comcast every since.

Comcast gets a bad rap but they've been pretty great to us:  generally increasing our speeds for less money - what's better than that?

Shortly before the Covid-times I upgraded to Gigabit Comcast and was happy.

But then the Covid-times hit and I was working entirely from home and I became aware that my Comcast connection would go out to lunch for about five minutes once or twice a day.  

During the first two years of Covid I did try to get it fixed.  First, I switched out the modem in case it was the problem (it wasn't); and then I called Comcast, twice during those two years, and a technicians would come out and rotate all the connectors and try some signal boosters and such.  But none of that fixed it.  It would work really well - very fast - faster than promised - but go out to lunch for five minutes.

Those big thick red lines are five minute outages.  Spoiler alert: it's the same amount of time it takes ro reboot the router.

How it looks now.  Beautiful!

It was not good for me to disappear for five minutes in the middle of an online meeting, so I needed a backup.  I went with T-Mobile home internet which was LTE and about 20 megabits down and 2-3 megabits up - but reliable, except during power outages.

A couple of years went by and I finally decided I really needed to get my Comcast connection fixed - it felt like some distribution equipment was broken in the neighborhood which caused the five minute outages.  

And while I was at it, I wanted to make my backup internet systems more reliable too.

Oh, and we got virtually no signal from Verizon, our cell carrier, and most of our phone calls were carried over Comcast via Wi-Fi calling.  So I couldn't use our cell phones data as a backup.

Things were worst during a power outage - Comcast crapped out even if I had my modem on a UPS; and T-Mobile would drop it's connection although it was on a UPS; and Verizon never worked unless we physically drove out of our cell coverage shadow (never mind about a power outage).

My plan to get Comcast fixed was to call them and have them come out again and again until they figured it out.  If things went like they had in the past, a technician would come out, change the connectors, try a new amplifier or two, and one time they swapped out the modem.  Nothing got better., so I assume going forward, a tech would come out, do the same things, and it wouldn't get better, but eventually they would have to escalate the problem inside Comcast.  That was the plan at any rate.

My plan for T-Mobile internet was to switch to Starlink after my friend HB demonstrated how far along they were with satellite deployments.

And, ironically, my plan for Verizon was to switch to Google Fi, which is T-Mobile in our area.  We get a little data over T-Mobile, but I doubt it will work during a power outage.  We haven't had an outage yet long enough to test my hypothesis.  It's got a better chance than Verizon.

It took six months to do these things and now they are all done!  I have slower but more reliable Comcast (400 megabits down); T-Mobile cell service which works (mostly) at our house; and Starlink.

In succeeding posts I'll describe what went right and wrong with my plan.  It was an eventful transition.