Tag Archives: Technology

Internet, Technology

Fiber

2 Comments

Well, we’ve hopped on the fiber bandwagon. We were paying about $140/month for Spectrum cable with only internet – no TV, no phone lines, no DVR, nothing else. Earlier this year I had also returned my Spectrum router when I finally realized we had been paying an extra $10 per month just for that. We had the 1GB plan, which offers speeds of up to 1GB download and 35MB upload. The download speeds were decent, but often dipped below 500mbps probably due to our neighbors also using the same circuit. That wasn’t too bad for download speed, but for personal reasons, 35MB upload speed was quickly becoming a bottleneck.

T-Mobile Fiber was offering 2GB up AND down for $70 as part of their “Founders Club Deal”, which includes a 10-year price lock guarantee, among other things. To be honest, this deal was too good to pass up and I couldn’t wait for it to get here. A few months ago I was able to pre-order it, then it was just a matter of time before they contact me to schedule an installation date & time.

T-Mobile has been installing fiber in Kenosha from the North side to the South side for about the past year and a half. They dug up many lawns along the way installing the fiber connection boxes next to the sidewalks on the street side. Lucky us–we would up with two of those in-ground connection boxes in our lawn since we live on a corner lot. We have a box in front of our house and one on the side of our house. I wondered which box they would run our fiber from, hoping it would be the side-of-the-house box, since that one was closest to where I knew they came in with cable years ago.

On our installation day, a couple hours before the actual install time, a fiber truck came and started digging near the side-of-the-house box and ran their orange fiber line under the sidewalk and left a roll of fiber there next to the sidewalk. When the actual installer arrived later the same day, I gave him a walk-through and showed him where my router needs to go and where he needs to bring the line into the house. I also requested that he put the router in Bridge mode so I can use my own router, which was already configured for all of my (100+) devices and it’s actually a newer router than what T-Fiber provides. They give you a Wifi 6 router built into their ONT. My router is a Wifi 7. I purchased it when I returned Spectrum’s router to them to save the extra $10/month. T-Fiber doesn’t charge for their router, it’s all built into the ONT device they provide, and it’s a decent router, but T-Fiber provides very limited access to their router–I found that devices couldn’t even be renamed in the admin to identify them on the network easily. I need Bridge mode enabled to avoid the usual issues whenever you try to use two routers on one network. You basically have two of everything – two Wifi routers, two DHCP servers, two firewalls, etc. It can get pretty complicated trying to get everything to work that way. In bridge mode all of those features are disabled and bypassed. The internet signal passes straight through the ONT and into my own router.

As it turned out, the installation tech couldn’t enable Bridge mode, and neither could the tech at T-Fiber Support who he talked to. He told me I had to call support and request it myself, then they’ll enable it. I did this immediately after confirming my installation was successful and my speed test results were good for 2GB symmetrical internet service. I was told by support that they would put in the request and that someone will be contacting me within 24-48 hours. I assumed it might flip to Bridge mode at any time, so I kept an eye on the network during this time. I had a few issues, especially with having Double NATs, but this was expected based on my research into using your own router for Fiber.

The next day a T-Fiber Support Tech called me, but only to confirm that I wanted Bridge mode activated and that I would be using my own router from then on. I confirmed and he said he initiate the request and it’ll take up to 24 hours to complete, but it’s usually completed well before that time. I didn’t quite understand why this wasn’t done the first time I called, but it seems like there’s a second level of service that a ticket has to go through for Bridge mode, so my ticket had to get to that second team, then, after confirmation, the ticket can be processed. Anyway, at 5:30am the following morning (two days after the install) Bridge mode finally activated, so I rebooted my router and everything came back online as expected and my issues with have two routers were gone.

Everything is working great now, and they even came out exactly 1 week after the install and buried the orange fiber cable going from under the sidewalk to our house. They had estimated 10 days to bury the cable, so 7 days was even better. They did a nice job too, and didn’t destroy much of our lawn. They dug a thin trench, but only folded the top lawn over, then placed it back where it was afterward, leaving very little sign that it had been dug up at all.

All in all we’re very happy with our fiber so far, and having full control of my router is something I’m very relieved about. We had Spectrum for many years, and i even remember posting on my blog about them, especially when we kept killing hard drives in our DVRs. I think we went through 3 or 4 of them. I’d have to go back and read my old posts to be sure. That was back around 2004…wow, over 20 years ago now. My blog and really old. Today we have only internet service, and we subscribe to YouTube TV for TV and DVR services. No DVR except YouTube TV’s cloud DVR, which works great for us. No more landlines or FAX machines either, but internet. My, how things change. Now I have to start pulling out all of the old cable coax that runs to all the rooms in the house. It’s useless now. I think I still have all the wiring hanging from the ceiling in the basement for the old telephones too. Time to clean up.

Technology

Geeks, TWiTs, and Tech, oh my!

Leave a comment

Anybody else remember TechTV?  Ah, the good old days of having a channel just for us geeks… I remember it very fondly, especially The ScreenSavers with Leo LaPorte and Patrick Norton.  I used to watch that channel quite a bit until it disappeared.  I learned a lot from those guys…and still do. Today the content that was that single channel is spread across everything.  Maybe geeks are finally becoming mainstream.  Yikes! We’re multiplying at an alarming rate, somebody stop the madness!

Seriously, tech and those that know how to use it, is everywhere now, and you have to know it (or at least enough bits of it) to get by.  Is your microwave still flashing “12:00” at you?  If it is, you might not be a geek…And I’m no Jeff Foxworthy, so I won’t continue with that joke.  But with today’s smartphones, small computers, tablets, smartwatches, internet everywhere, etc., etc., it’s clear the world is getting more and more tech-based all the time.

I began in IT in 1981.  It’s still hard to believe it’s been that long ago (36 years. You’re welcome, Kev), but then I look at how far the tech has come and it’s mind-boggling.  My first computer was a Radio Shack TRS-80 – a “Trash Eighty” as it was known as, with a whopping 4K of RAM (that’s 4,000 “characters” or “typed letters” it could hold in memory).  It came as a somewhat-small black * white CRT monitor, which–and I can’t even remember this part clearly enough–also contained the computer components–or at least “some” of them.  Need a visual? Here, have a flashback.  The rest of it was a big, bulky keyboard, which I believe held the rest of the components to round out the entire computer.  But with just these two small pieces, you had an entire computer and you could actually DO things with it!  SAVING what you did on it was an entirely different animal–just as it is today.  Back then you had to buy a cassette tape drive if you were on a budget, and you’d save and load your programs and data from cassette tapes (yes, just like those old music cassettes you heard of, and might have actually seen or used on occasion,from the olden days) that were high-quality, fragile little storage units.  Read and write errors–even with the highest-quality, most-expensive tapes–were frequent, and the loss of dozens or even hundreds of hours of work was almost common.  And God forbid if you had a magnet in your house!  Those who weren’t on such a budget could splurge and pay thousands of dollars for a newfangled “floppy drive”.  They offered a ton more space, were much much faster, and with them you were much less likely to have all of your hair gone (pulled out) by the time you turned 25.  I won’t even go into hard drives.  Those didn’t even appear on the map for some time later on.

But looking at those details you can see how far we’ve come.  As a comparison, the power in that huge, very heavy computer from back then is now fully contained in just a small chip in your smartwatch.  Not even the whole watch, just a chip inside it. Mind-boggling, as I said.  But our society is fast becoming more and more tech-savvy as all of these gadgets continue to spread, evolve, and shrink.  So we’re ALL pretty much becoming “geeks” to one extent or another.  Maybe only in certain areas, but geeks nonetheless.

Where I am going with this, I have no idea.  I just woke up this morning, this was running through my head, and I needed to write.  Like most things in this blog, it’s just random thoughts and memories that come to me.  (he says, as he straps on his Moto 360 while listening to his Windows 10 PC connected to his 55″ LG TV, streaming classic 80’s songs from a Amazon Music…) Geek on.