ISP is flaking out almost exactly at 5pm when their office closes. HOW CONVENIENT. 😛
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@bigzaphod Sounds like the opposite of one of our big three companies here, who my wife and I were with when we moved to this area, and the service was fine until it suddenly wasn’t. Brutal signal, calls suddenly but sporadically dropped, not a good time.
I called them and they didn’t know why this sharp drop in signal strength.
The crap service kept on.
I called again shortly after that and they still didn’t know why.
The crap service kept on.
I think it was my third call — maybe my fourth? — where I finally asked to talk to the next tier of service, maintaining that someone somewhere actually had an answer for this. And the next person I talked to confirmed that Oh yeah, we recently had a tower go down that serviced your area.
Oh, said I, silently wondering why this little nugget of news didn’t trickle down the food chain, and is there any ETA for the repair or replacement of that tower?
No, they said. It probably won’t get fixed or replaced unless enough people call to complain about the issue.
We left the service immediately after that. 🤷♂️
@bigzaphod In an industry dominated by mega corporations it’s nice to be able to support the small providers.
The ISP I use was architected by one of my coworkers, and the owner (though I don’t actually know him) lives less than a mile from my house. There’s almost nothing that would make me switch away.
As a kid my family’s very first ISP was a local company handing out floppies at our credit union. They were eventually bought out by a big player and their office is a spa/massage place now.
@dmnelson I worked for the very first ISP in town in the late 90s. That was a fun time. Racks and racks of modems. Floppies and later CDs to install the drivers and stuff. Cable internet kinda killed us off, though. lol.
@Eggfreckles it's not cellular, I know. Not sure the official term for this category, but it's kind of like souped up wifi as I understand it. They have radios on many towers around town and then customers have radios at their homes that need to point pretty much directly at those towers. Mine is on an old TV antenna tower the house came with (which was handy). They upgraded a few years ago and I get 250+ down, but upload is 1/10th of that. Nowhere near fiber, but didn't have any other option.
@Eggfreckles the frustrating bit is that this same company does fiber, too, and actually buried some down my street but they stopped literally one property away from my house. Since my house is the only house on this side of the street, kind of offset away from the street and in a field, and there's a creek in the way... they punted. So I'm stuck with the wireless. Which mostly doesn't matter and is fast enough, but... but.... I want more.
@bigzaphod Okay that sounds eerily like when my router kept losing WAN around 5am *and* 5pm every day. Briefly considered router was dying before suspecting my fiber modem was to blame. But then the problem disappeared with no intervention on my part, and I’m just choosing to believe some minion ATT tech discovered a misconfiguration and quietly pushed out a fix.
And of course ATT will never admit wrongdoing or give credit for the brief outages.
@bigzaphod One time I had an issue for close to a year, every day around the same time, my connection would totally drop for at least 5-10 minutes. After I don’t know how many people coming over to “fix” it, they found out that a Fire Department down the street had been testing a new system at that same time, and others finally started complaining.. Weird.
@JPZ oh wow... some kind of interference, I guess?
@bigzaphod I never found out the “how”, just the “why”.. But I remember at the time, after that day I never had those consistent issues anymore. Things can be weird when you least expect them to.
Last night my ISP got flaky right around 5pm. I posted about it here, sent them an email then logged off for a bit and got some food, etc.
By the time we sat down to watch TV it was working fine again and I sorta forgot about it.
This morning they called and told me they had a problem on a tower and fixed it by 7pm and they just wanted to let me know.
Honestly, I like my ISP. They aren't the fastest, but they're a small local company, they always call back, and they always fix their problems.