Sunday, June 05, 2005

Internet Woes

My internet has been down since Friday. It has been frustratingly slow and intermittent for months now. They have come out multiple times to install new modems and it works for a few hours then goes back down again. After the third call today of this week and an estimated two days for the technician to arrive and to try and diagnose, I took matters into my own hand. (Why they didn’t check the signal strength on the line I do not know.)

This house has cable in every room. There are two 1000 mhz splitters out in the cable box on the back of the house with five distinct lines running from them to each room via the basement. I unhooked the line coming from the telephone pole than ran into the box and water just poured out of the first cable splitter I tried. Apparently, the cable box has a bad leak. It is supposed to be sealed to the elements.

I went and bought a new high performance 2300 mhz splitter at radio shack for $10. I came home and installed it and instantly my modem fired back to life and I was back on the web with a rock solid connection. (3 megabytes per second down.) All these months of a poor, crappy connection and it was as simple as that. It feels damn good to be back online and to have solved the problem myself. They kept trying to blame my router or my computer which I was sure it was not the problem.

Next, I must begin the arduous task of trying to get them to refund the past few months of my internet bill. They did a poor and faulty install of the cable box which let the water in. I will bug ‘em till they relent I tell ya! I can’t wait to see the look on Randy’s (the technician) face when I show him what was wrong. He has been over here so much we are on a first name basis.

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