Technology hell.
This has been the weekend from hell. On Thursday we lost our Internet access and I spent close to 3 hours on the phone with various Sympatico people trying to diagnose the problem. I can’t keep a connection to their service. Their conclusion is that suddenly all three of our phone jacks have “gone bad”. How this happens is a mystery to me, but whatever. So then I have to call Bell and schedule a repair person to come who’ll show up between 8AM and 4PM on Thursday.
So because I work on call and have to connect to work from home, I grabbed the cheapest package Rogers has for the Internet. It works, but it’s about 15 kilobytes per second in each direction. It’s fine if I’m not using BitTorrent on it (which Rogers fucking throttles anyways).
Now in the midst of plugging in the new cable modem my router, a Linksys WRT54G pre-VXWare fiasco, fries. As in suddenly it resets and when it comes back none of the network interfaces on it work anymore. So I factory restore it, change the firmware, and so on and nothing. It responds just fine on the wireless LAN but will transmit no data on it’s wired jacks.
Pissed off, I go and replace the stupid router and get a new power bar with a surge protector for the cable line and the phone line, on the off chance that the power is fucked up enough to damage equipment.
To add to the whole mess I went into work on Saturday morning to upgrade our firewall there (since it’s pretty much the one thing I can’t do remotely) and it should have been seamless. It was almost seamless, except post-upgrade it wouldn’t accept any more inbound VPN connections due to a bug in the configuration update system. A bug that their engineers confirmed, yet no one else has had before. Luckily rolling back the firmware and restoring was no big deal.
And to top everything off, over the last couple weeks my Xbox 360 has been sounding more and more like a goddamned jet engine spooling up in our living room, getting so loud that I have to keep increasing the volume on the games to drown it out. Well I don’t have to worry about that anymore, since now it won’t read discs! I’ve called and they’re replacing it and sending a box this week. For anyone keeping score this is the second time since January that a 360 has croaked on me.
So yeah, the last few days have been last than fun.
Robin Ward said,
March 5, 2007 @ 12:17 pm
Jesus christ. It pissed me off just to read this entry, and none of it even personally affected me!
Ron said,
March 6, 2007 @ 10:00 am
Wow, that sounds shitty indeed.
1a. Bell is likely full of horseshit.
1b. Rogers is almost as bad. Sorry to hear about that one.
2. My experiences also confirm that Linksys isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, even “back in the day.” I had a BEFS41R or something, and paid way too much for it, and it never worked properly right from day 1, but they wouldn’t replace it because it still technically worked. Many frustrations later, I finally threw it against a wall, and it came open, voiding the worthless warranty. After plugging it back in with no casing, I was able to trace the problem to faulty circuitboard componentry.
3. Sounds like your 360 experiences are typical. I’ve heard tons and tons of complaints.
Good luck getting all that shit sorted out. And if there’s anything I can do to help you out, let me know. :)
Luke said,
March 6, 2007 @ 2:49 pm
Yeah, I actually can’t stand Rogers, Bell or Telus yet I pay all three. There’s not a lot of choices here, and when there is a choice it’s usually just resellers of the big three (like Fido or any DSL provider in Toronto).
Linksys routers, yeah. The WRT54Gv3s and below ran a Linux-based firmware that was quite decent at managing connections and it attracted a bunch of groups that created custom firmwares. Then with the v4s they switched to a VxWorks kernel instead of Linux and a lower capacity CPU - the consequence being that the amount of simultaneous connections tracked went way down, causing all sorts of problems for peer-to-peer software. To be fair, the latest firmware for the v6 I bought had “Address Bittorrent issues” in the release notes (but it’s a moot point for me since my desktop machine is doing all the routing and torrents anyways).
A lot of people think Cisco purposely cripped the WRTs because they were competing with their own higher end products, but I think they just saw a way to cut costs on a router.
derek said,
March 6, 2007 @ 9:54 pm
The Buffalo WHR-G54S runs a lot of the third-party firmware developed originally for the WRT-series. I’ve heard nothing but good things about the router (don’t own myself, still using an older WRT with Tomato firmware. QoS isn’t great for VoIP, but you get what you pay for).
Sucks about everything else though. Personally, I have a hard time finding fault with Rogers (as much as I’d like too). I have their extreme service with the digital vip tv (HD box) package and a cell phone and I’m only paying $110 a month. The funny thing is that the TV service is the most unreliable.
Ever since enabling the encryption option in uTorrent (and using private trackers) I’ve never noticed any throttling on BT traffic.
Luke said,
March 6, 2007 @ 10:22 pm
I find that regardless of using encryption and private trackers I get consistently a third of what I normally do on a Torrent. Also, if they fucking charge per gigabyte over their cap then there’s absolutely no reason to messing with my connection on the protocol level. Allegedly that removes them from the protection of being a common carrier but I doubt anybody gives a shit at this point.
Also, I find fault with Rogers having sales people call me and offer me unlimited high speed Internet connections, and then hang up when I point out on their web page where it outlines the download limits. Oh, and of course the sales people are “free agents” and “off site”, so there’s no records of which employee called who.
Luke said,
March 6, 2007 @ 10:25 pm
Also goddamn we should hang out eventually, eh? :-)
derek said,
March 7, 2007 @ 12:22 am
Agreed. ;) Been horrible about keeping up with people lately.
I agree about the issues with the cap, but I consistently go over it and I haven’t been charged extra. I also told them to end all sales calls a long time ago and they haven’t called back since. I had one issue with them trying to contact April about her cellphone (and being pretty rude about it) and they gave us a discount on the monthly bill because of the complaint.
If I noticed any throttling on BT traffic, I’d be just as pissed. For some reason though, I seem to be exempt from both the monthly cap and packet shaping. Hope they don’t notice. ;)
I’ll drop you an email tomorrow.
Ron said,
March 8, 2007 @ 7:44 pm
So, did the Bell tech show up?
Luke said,
March 8, 2007 @ 7:47 pm
Yeah. Yeah… He came and told Chie that it probably wasn’t the jacks and then said he was going to get a Sympatico technician. Then he never came back. He told us he suspects the modem, but he’s now M.I.A. Helpful!
Matt said,
March 9, 2007 @ 10:26 am
you posted. im happy.
electrons are the source of all the hate i feel in this life.
Ron said,
March 9, 2007 @ 11:32 am
That’s Bell for ya.
My former employers had a franchised BellWorld store and had been in the business since 1979 and even they admit that Ma Bell is a Whore.
Also, both my parents, my sister, and Meghan’s mom have had billing issues with them recently. As soon as my dad got that bill, and I recommended several alternatives, he said he was switching first thing the next day. Meghan’s mum is waiting to see how our current provider is in the long run before deciding. My sister long ago dropped them, but they keep charging her credit card — for someone else’s account!! Fun!
Won’t be long before I have everyone I know sworn off Bell for good.
D-Kal said,
April 8, 2007 @ 1:01 pm
I had to call Bell for tech support a while back, ended up speaking to someone in India.
The first thing I asked was if there was a known problem in my area, this frustrated the dude on the other end who was trying to get through his script. I repeatedly asked him to elevate me to a higher tech support tier but he wouldn’t do it. I had to go through all the crap they make you do like rebooting my computer even though I told him it was a problem that was even affecting my VOIP. After about 2.5 hours on the phone with this dude he finally elevated me. The next tier guy called me a liar when I was explaining that I had a connection but around 95% packet loss. After speaking with that dude for a while, he finally said that there was a problem in the area and that it should be cleared in a couple of hours but still insisted on booking a dude to come look at the problem.
The problem cleared by the next morning, and luckily the bell dude called me so I canceled him.
A couple of years ago when Rogers was still Rogers@home, I had a similar problem. I spoke to a tech support dude in Toronto who told me there was a problem in the area right away. The phone call was about a minute long and he credited my bill for the downtime.
The question in my mind is, was it really cost-effective to outsource the support? And if you are going to outsource, wouldn’t it make sense to let the people on the other end think and end the call in 5 minutes instead of approaching three hours?
NegZero said,
April 8, 2007 @ 8:26 pm
D-Kal, I’ve had the exact same scenario with Rogers happen to me over and over again until I gave up and went over to Bell. They are both useless but unfortunately even the 3rd party carriers lease from them so there is really no winning.. I’ll stick with Bell for now, no throttling of my downloads, and NO CAP since I was an existing subscriber…
NegZero said,
August 6, 2007 @ 10:11 pm
5 months huh? You still alive Luke? or just giving up on blogging? I’m pretty close myself…