Broadband Reminders
Today I had a friendly reminder that broadband connections do not mean always on. For whatever reason, I found that my connection was down today. Needless to say, this was not going to work. So after resetting my FiOS ONT, resetting my router (as rebooting did not help), and still finding no success to be had, I finally broke down and called tech support.
Right away, I knew from personal experience that it would save me a lot of time if I explained that I do this sort of thing for a living. Despite being “retired” from PC repair, I knew enough to make sure the support staff realized that I had already tried the usual routine. Oddly enough, despite it not being apparent at first, they actually heard me.
Verizon staff did a connection test to my ONT and found the problem there. Rather than wasting my time rebooting the router and ONT ’til the world looked level, they simply did something on their end with the ONT that fixed the issue. So even though the ONT showed a status light indicating that things were fine, clearly that was not the case. Even worse, restarting the ONT w/battery removal for the reset did not do it. No, it took the tech support team doing whatever they did on their end to get this resolved.
Thankfully, through a little bit of patience, things worked out. And because I eliminated what the problem wasn’t, verified through the router that I was not successfully obtaining an IP address from Verizon, I was able to prevent more wasted time with another router being sent out when it was not the problem.
I also made sure not to bother explaining that the provided Actiontec Router that Verizon leases has one of the worst routers I have ever owned. But I need to use it for my coaxial connection, despite the fact that the routing tables take a nose dive in router mode. Luckily, I use my Draytek as my main router while keeping the Actiontec in bridge mode to take me from coaxial to ethernet.
At the end of the day, the setup works very well. Still, in hindsight I wish I had just asked Verizon to run CAT5 to my home office rather tapping into the existing coaxial running throughout the house.
4 Comments
Do You Remember When Life was Simple? | Chris Pirillo
May 16th, 2009
at 12:20am
[...] Having a broadband connection does not mean you are “always connected”. [...]
Keith Stoneberger
May 16th, 2009
at 6:39am
If I ever calle dthe tech support, which usually was amost every week with DSL servixe ( I have COMCAST now), the first thin I would do would explain that I know what I was doing and explain the troubleshooting steps and sometimes I would get the idiot that knew less than anyone and I would still have to go through anything.
Raymond Combs
May 16th, 2009
at 5:46pm
I just had a similar problem with Comcast. What was strange, was that they told me NOT to pull the b/u battery when rebooting! They said that they have found that you may lose all your ISP settings, and you will have to set it up again! It works just as well to just pull the power plug to reset the unit.
BTW – it was a general area outage!
Alex Tsui
May 24th, 2009
at 4:34pm
I have to agree. However, my ISP is not intrusive on daytime internet usages. Routers commonly reset 2~3 times each month at about 3AM. Cablevision, my ISP, doesn’t do it that often. However, they did give us a valuable explanation. Because they commonly work hard to bring faster and better internet (in this case, Optimum Online ULTRA, being worked on right now), they’ll cut off lower-leveled broadband users for the purpose of ensuring that the newer systems work. This means everyone gets cut for about 30 seconds to 2 minutes.
It has never interfered with me personally. However, it has cut me during IRC, MSN, AIM, etc. one or two times. I’m alright with it. Besides, after that, the internet grows very fast in the morning.