Fast Internet
Connection Sharing

Fast internet connections through cable and dsl modems are the latest rage.  Real low cost advances are now becoming available to people in the interconnected aspects of computing.  The internet, a major harbinger of this development, is a case in point.  The explosion of the internet as a feature of home life is simply unprecedented, at least in terms of the speed of its deployment.  The point of this is not to harp on the internet, but to point to the significance of (relatively) fast connections to the internet.

Cable and dsl phone line internet connections are the central features of this landscape change.  Telephone modems are becoming obsolete note that there has been no major improvement in telephone modem connection speeds for several years.  In fact, if current trends continue, wire connections themselves may become obsolete within 20 years. 

As it stands, the major phone and cable companies are in a real nasty cat fight to maintain wire monopolies by providing fast ethernet access on phone and cable lines, providing modems for cheap or free, signing people up for over a year, sending people to do free installation who spend hours on site.  This adds up to a major loss leader for the telco’s and cable vendors to maintain a monopoly on internet access through the lines on the poles. 

They are really challenged and their response has been to buy up and merge cable and internet service companies.  This has resulted in the difficult discovery that their new corporate structures are unwieldy and unmanageable.  Witness the rapid consolidation of ATT Broadband and subsequent spinoffs of ATT subsidiaries.  The whole thing is almost ludicrous, but a lot of money is at stake.

How can this help me?

Imagine being able to work on your computer in the office from at home, as though you were actually in the office typing on the keyboard. That is now entirely possible and many higher end technology companies are providing opportunities for their employees to do just that. The beauty of this is that if you have a fast internet connection at your home and at your office, you can do all this too!

How do I do it?

To be Continued

Setting up Fast Ethernet Accounts

Mediaone/ATT:

Mediaone was an aggressive television cable company that opened the door for broadband internet via cable in some areas of New England in the late 1990's.   The company developed infrastructure, marketed cable services and then was acquired by ATT.  The ATT web site that was put in the place of the Mediaone site has serious bugs.   Links don't work and the layout is full of barriers.  One wonders what the problem is.  Fortunately, this TELCO has not yet done anything to mess up the excellent service base built by Mediaone and the connection is quite good and fast.   I would rate this service pretty well.  Very little downtime has happened.  Tech support is reachable when you need them, and they help fix the problem for the most part.  They don't like to know that you are sharing that fast internet connection amongst a bunch of computers though.  In some regions, they require the eathernet adapter NIC number to allow a connect.  Linksys offers a line of routers which have a configurable NIC function, enabling you to put in whatever NIC you want, bypassing the need to notify the ISP of any change in your home network configuration.  Routers are the way to go and if you want to look for growth in the computer business.  Look at the companies selling small home office Routing devices.

Verizon:

I don't like Verizon's DSL service.  The upload speed is way too slow, their obsession with PPOE is an unecessary obstacle and the connection is very unreliable, you keep having to reconnect and sometimes that can take hours.  Overall the company exhibits all the nasty tendencies of the TELCO's to provide customer service -- NOT.  The online configuration is even harder to use than ATT's and often doesn't work.  Need tech support???   Better put on the speaker phone and make some lunch, you are gonna be on hold awhile.

Have you dealt with PPoE?  Verizon/BA ships that as part of their ADSLpackage, which for the price, I find somewhat limiting as it only runs at something like 640/90.  Imagine, a state of the art phone company with that kind of limitation.

Unbelievable, but that's why they keep "innovating" for us.  The Verizon technician came today to install a "splitter" to split off the dsl signal from the phone signal before it gets to the voice mail/intercom/phone extensions/alarm modem equipment in the basement.  The guy had taken a training course 9 months ago and had done only a couple of these jobs so he really didn't know what was going on.  But then, I have a lot of questions.

I wanted him to trace a phone line, cause there's a dedicated phone lineup to this room where the computers are on the third floor.  I was pretty sure that the line was installed to bypass all the other telephony crap (i.e. the voice mail/intercom/phone extensions/alarm modem) in the basement because the other telephony crap is incompatible with the conventional computer modems on our systems on the third floor.  That is, you can't dial out with a computer through the system because the modem signal gets screwed up on the way through the system and any modem on the other end won't let you connect.  (This is also a major problem for dsl hence the need for a "splitter")

Of course the Lucent technicians that sold the fancy phone equipment claimed there would be no problem with the computer modem they had (2400 baud on an old ps2).  So they bypassed the phone answering machine system with a dedicated line.  Historically, the bypass worked fine except for one big problem.  The phone system didn't register that the computer was on line.  That meant that if you picked up on any extension you'd pick up on the modem connection, with the attendant unpleasant noise and the fucked up modem connection.  All around a messy situation.

I wanted the Verizon splitter guy to trace the phone line, cause if he was gonna put a "splitter" in, he should do so where the lines split and the dedicated line went upstairs and the other line went off to the other telephony equipment.... makes sense right?????Well, his subsidiary of Bell Atlantic doesn't do the lines, they just do the splitters.  Another BA/Verizon subsidiary does the lines and they're not coming till the 25th.

Of course the first appointment was was scheduled for the13th but he came on the 11th.
 

Anyway, I made the guy give me his tone generator and I plugged it in to the computer phone jack on the third floor (aka the dedicated line) and I made him use his wand to pick up the signal, isolate it in the basement and told him that was where I wanted him to put the splitter.  Job done, he went away, then came back a few minutes later to get his very expensive looking DSL signal detector which he had left in the basement.   Eventually, like in two months, his subsidiary will do both the lines and the splitters.

In the meanwhile we installed a router which takes care of the PPoE connection except when the Verizon server goes down, or it kicks you off which is not entirely out of the ordinary.  Then  you have to manually click a reconnect button in the router which isn't that difficult but it can be frustrating if Verizon's connection won't respond.