Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

I promised details on the network outage I suffered a few days ago. Here's what I started to write then but didn't have time to finish.

I just got a network hardware upgrade: a new cinderblock. Uh, yeah, there's some backstory to explain that:

Okay, so the broadband antenna on my roof was bolted to a cinderblock that was just sitting there on the roof. This sounded inadequate to me when they set it up, but the tech said it would be fine, and he'd done lots and lots of antenna installations and I've not done any, so he's the expert. (As I understand it, line of sight to their antenna downtown from my chimmney is blocked by a steeple in the next block, and that's why he didn't just bolt the antenna to that.) And lo, this did indeed work fine, despite thunderstorms and such, until that evening last month when we had gusts fierce enough that all the local television news programs demmed it worthy of a story. I rang up the ISP and left a message on their machine saying that my conection was down, got a call back asking me to please check that the antenna was getting power, and was told that someone would call back when they could schedule a housecall. Once night fell I was expecting them to schedule a visit in the morning. Instead, just as I was heading out the door to play a gig, the truck showed up and the technician very quickly went up on my roof and realigned the antenna, confirming my guess that the wind had blown it out of position. He also said my house was the only one that had had problems that day, despite the high winds.

After that, the cinderblock the antenna was bolted to was weighed down by two more cinderblocks. And lo, this improved solution worked until Thursday, when we had a very loud afternoon here in SoWeBo, with steady high high winds of a rather impressive nature. When the rain stopped pouring out of the sky at that alarming rate (we had flash flood warnings -- not at my house, on a hill, but in a lot of places nearby -- and the authorities were worried aboud high tide and asked folks near the harbour to move their cars), I rang up my ISP and said I thought the antenna had blown out of line again (hoping I was wrong, and it was something they could fix by reconfiguring a router). Well, I was right and then some...

The wind on the antenna had ripped the mounting bolts right out of the cinderbloock. The tech said he'd never seen anything like it. He used longer bolts that go through two cinderblocks this time. He also said I'm the only customer who has needed two service calls, and that it's probably because I'm so much higher up than a lot of other parts of town, so my house gets extra wind that other customers are shielded from by geography. I guess I get to be the extreme antenna-mount test platform. The antenna is a flat square, but it's not very large -- I would have expected that kind of result to require a bit more sail area -- but as I said, the wind was dramatically loud, more fierce than I can recall in the time I've lived in Baltimore. And although I've now needed two service calls to realign the antenna, I'll concede that the only times it's happened have been on days with newsworthy winds, not typical thunderstorm winds. (But it does suggest that I'll be cut off if a hurricane hits Baltimore, which would be a drag.)

So on the minus side, I've needed to call them out here twice (which apparently makes me a statistical anomaly, not representative of what other customers can expect). Also on the minus side, there have been shorter outages caused by glitches at their end (where I can see packets from other customers and from their router and another of their machines, but nothing gets out to the Internet at large), usually clearing up after a few minutes with no action on my part, only once lasting long enough for me to bother to call (and that was fixed a few minutes after I left the message about it). And on the plus side, when I've had to call them, the outage has been measured in hours, and a very small number of hours, at that (like, two to four hours, counting the time for me to decide it's not a temporary routing glitch or a problem with my machines, and wait for the weather to allow safe access to my roof again), compared to the days I had to wait for a repair call every damned time a telephone line went out. Also on the plus side, when they got a faster (or more reliably fast?) upstream connection, they quietly upgraded all their customers to a higher speed as well -- I signed up for 768Kbps down/256Kbps up, and now my downstream speed is 1Mbps. They didn't make a big deal about this; I only knew because I was chatting with the tech while he was here to fix my antenna. He said "most customers haven't even noticed yet". (I'd noticed download file transfer speeds that seemed "too fast", and wondered about that. Though I noticed it more consistently with FTP, where the average-speed-for-this-file number stays on my screen longer, before the upgrade; it turns out FTP packets really do go faster, for an unrelated reason. There's also a burst mode feature similar to something one of their competitors advertises, implemented without fanfare here.) Add to that the fact that when I have questions, they're answered by someone with real knowledge of how the stuff works and how their network is set up (I'm pretty sure the "tech" who has come to my house is more than just an install technician -- I'm not sure what his job title is, but I get the impression he wears more than one hat. And I'll count the real reason that I went with this ISP in the first place as a 'plus' as well: $29.95/month (for the slowest speed) without also having to pay for a phone line or cable, with a static IP address and no restrictions about running servers from home.

It's worth noting that the rapid response for service calls, a whole order of magnitude (or in some cases two) faster than the phone company, is something I'm seeing as a customer of their cheapest service, not some "gotta keep the huge corporate client happy" special treatment. I'm sure that some of this is simply due to being a much smaller company than Verizon and having fewer customers to support, but even taking that into consideration, it still speaks well of their attitude toward customer service. I haven't even heard the phrase "next business day" in response to a call for service, even late on a Friday; just "as soon as we can get someone out there". (I haven't had to call on a Saturday or Sunday yet, so I don't know whether they'd send someone out during a weekend or not.)

And there's this attitude thing, where my getting the advertised speed most of the time wasn't considered good enough -- before the first wind-related service call, there was a service call at their request because they weren't happy with the signal strength they were seeing from my house and decided to point me at a different antenna they'd just added on their tower (actually the roof of one of the tall buildings downtown). They seem to be interested in making the technology work As It's Supposed To, not just "enough to get by".

Although having had two outages caused by extreme wind is annoying, on the whole I'd have to call my experience with this ISP quite positive.

So while the main reason for writing this entry was to comment on the dramatic effect of last week's winds -- I'm still shaking my head over the fact that it ripped the bolts right out of the cinderblock -- I guess it's turned into a testimonial from a satisfied customer. If you can see downtown Baltimore from your roof (I think it's the Legg Mason building you need to be able to see, but I'm not certain whether I've remembered correctly -- and they may have other antenna sites I don't know about) and are shopping for an Internet connection, consider Believe Wireless.