A Visit from Cox
A couple of days ago, the phone rang in the afternoon. I answered it, being the only one home, and the static was so bad I couldn't understand the person at the other end except that probably she was a telemarketer who wanted to talk to Cathy. Before I could mention the problem to Delia or Cathy, both of them arrived home and experienced phone problems of their own. In addition, Cathy lost her Internet connection.
For some reason, neither of them is capable of dealing with Cox. That is always left up to me. I try to train them into dealing with Cox, and they do sometimes try, but it always winds up being my problem. I called Cox and explained the two problems. Explaining the phone problem took just seconds and they promised to send somebody out this afternoon. It took about ten minutes to get to talk to a high speed Internet person but they, too, promised to send somebody out today, long after my appointment with the retina specialist (I didn't want them there while my eyes were still dilated).
The high speed Internet specialist decided to come early. Delia called me while I was still waiting to see the doctor. I told her I had scheduled the appointment for late in the afternoon on purpose and for her to tell the technician to come back at the appointed time. Of course she allowed herself to be bullied into letting him to look at the computer setup, which she doesn't understand well enough to answer his questions about. He had to come back later anyway.
I got home, had my lunch (Delia's fresh lentil soup) and was watching an old Randolph Scott western when the phone technician arrived. He found a few corroded connections and replaced the connectors with new ones. While he was working, the other technician came back.
We brought the Internet modem down ... and it wouldn't come back up. We tried a few tweaks inside, then he did some level measurements. The receive power was right in the middle of the scale but the reverse or transmit power measured at their central office was very, very low. We went outside to where the cable comes in from the box up on the telephone pole across the street. The reverse power was still very, very low, so the problem was up the pole, not inside the house. They will have to send out a crew with a cherry picker to install a new box on the line outside.
Meanwhile, the technician Tsk! Tsk!ed over my router -- not that I have one, but that it was a brand that almost nobody uses. Apparently everybody else in the world uses dLink, has no problems connecting, and is very happy with the equipment. I have yet to get a fully functional installation of my Netgear wireless interface, although the router itself seems to be doing its job.
Several months ago, Cox published a note to the effect that they will not support routers or other home networks but they won't punish them either. That's a good policy because there isn't a whole lot they can do about home networks of any kind anyway. They are pretty much undetectable unless you go inside the house and look at the equipment. If somebody starts using a whole lot of bandwidth they might be able to take some kind of action, but most people aren't going to cause any great problem for them.
The technician also noted that we have too much crap loaded on the computer. When the computer starts up, its capacity is down to 50% even before it starts doing anything. That is because of all of the stuff that Cathy has added since she started using the machine. The machine is perfectly adequate for its planned use, which was for Delia's email and occassional word processing and my annual income taxes. It was never intended to be used for online games, ICQ and Instant Messages, Internet Radio and all of the other stuff it is now doing. We don't need a bigger machine; we need for Cathy to get a machine of her own that she can connect through the router wirelessly.
Update
The cherry picker guy showed up sooner then expected, while I was still downstairs this evening. He was waiting for me when I came up. He had already run some tests on the part of the system on the outside of the house and had made a partial repair for the problem he found, a stray sixty volts floating on the system which he ran to ground with a new ground wire.
Anyway, I let him inside to search for the source of the hot voltage ... and he found it: the old television set we were given a couple of years ago and that we have connected to the digital cable modem.
Replacing the TV won't cost anything since we have a couple of old sets downstairs that are not in use. They are smaller, but that shouldn't matter -- Cathy usually watches TV while using the computer and the two sit side by side. It'll only bother her when she decides to watch something while in bed. If she can't live with a smaller screen, she can buy a set with a bigger screen.
Second Update
When Delia and Cathy got home, within a few minutes of each other, they both had the same complaint: the phone wasn't working. I immediately called Cox, who promised to have somebody out to look at it by Tuesday evening.
It's the internal house wiring that's screwed up. The phone in the master bedroom still works, as does the one downstairs. But the one in the dining room and the one in the computer room, the two wireless phones, are both disconnected. My hearing is bad enough that if I'm upstairs I won't hear the phone in the master bedroom ring. The one in the dining room has the answering machine, so any calls I don't answer will be missed calls.
Ahhh! A long weekend with the phones down!
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