Here we have a story as old as time — or at least, one as old as how long I’ve lived in this house. This is the tale of my absolutely rage endeucing internet gateway, a constant pain in my ass since 2013.
That’s where the story begins, actually – July 2013 and me moving into my current home. Of course one of the first things I did upon establishing myself here was to sign up for internet service and, given my limited options, I went with AT&T – the only other choice was Comcast, and if you know anytihng about me, then you should understand not only that I absolutely hate that company with a passion, but that from a standpoint of sheer practicality they were a non-starter — their infrastructure in this neighborhood is abysmal at best, and I had zero faith in even being able to get service… at least, not without paying for the priviledge of having them fix whatever the hell would be wrong with this house and its connection — something I’d have experience with years down the line DSL it was, for me, then. I eagerly awaited the day my self setup kit would come — I’d just plug the equipment into a phone line and off I’d be! Or so I thought.
Right around the time my equipment was supposed to come in — on the day the service was “activated” an AT&T tech arrived. Now, I was certain I had selected the self setup, and he verified I had — however, he needed to come out to “check on things” which, thankfully didn’t cost me anything. Honestly, the guy was pretty nice and once I found out why he had stopped at my place it all made sense: the junction box containing my connection to the PSTN was, to put it simply, fucked. As I’d find out in the past year that I’ve really gotten into phones it turns out all the wiring in the house, up to and including at the junction box, is absolutely wrecked for some reason. That’s part for the course, this house is a fucking mess, but it means that, without some kind of workaround, I literally cannot use any PSTN services — be it traditional POTS phone service, DSL, anything!
This means the self install kit, which I still have in its box, is absolutely useless! There was a solution, however — coaxial cable. Yes, since the house had previously had satellite TV there were several coaxial cable runs available which could be tapped and one just so happened to feed nicely into my room, which is where I, naturally, wanted the gateway to be since that’s where most of my equipment would be located.
This creates a bit of an ironic case in that my VDSL internet connection is being carried over a cable type which is most often associated with Television and thus “cable” internet — this ignores, of course, the fact that coaxial cable’s history really lies with the telephone network, but that’s a discussion for the future.
This also meant that I would need a different device, which the tech oh so kindly provided from his truck: A Pace Plc 3801HGV – a small, black box with both good old RJ-11 and Coaxial inputs for the VDSL signal. With a little rigging done outside in the network box things were golden, and I was online.
Beyond the fact the connection was, of course, a slower one (which again I must stress is still better than the virtually non-existent connection I could get with Comcast) which made video uploads annoying, things were good. At least, for a while.
Eventually the gateway would develop a little habit of just resetting, as if it had lost power then had it restored. It was every once in a while and, while annoying, I know equipment will do that sometimes if, for example, synchronization is lost with the central office DSL signal, so I didn’t think much of it beyond “damn, it did this again” when I’d happen to be in the middle of watching something, gaming, or working on a big project.
The other big complaint was that it was ancient as fuck as far as router standards go — maximum 54mbps for wifi, and max 100mbps ethernet over its 4 ports. I’ve since built little mini-networks using surplus Apple routers to help partially alleviate these issues, where practical, but it’s safe to say on a whole my LAN speeds absolutely suck.
That’s the way it was, off and on, for the past 8 years until sometime in the past month and a half, the gateway didn’t just do a little power cycle… it reset everything.
As in, an unintended factory reset of the entire gateway causing every customized setting, from the Wireless access credentials to firewall exceptions to static IP configurations to be lost.
I thought this would be a one time thing and that I’d just reconfigure and things would be good. Nope! I was dead wrong — this goddamned thing had repeatedly at least once every 7 days fully reset on me — sometimes far more often — up to 3 times in one week, requiring me to go through its tediously slow interface to reconfigure everything over, and over, and over.
What was once simply an annoying little skip in internet access being available has now turned into an exercise in system operator torture, as the moment I hear a relay click in it I know that I’m going to have to do all that work again, just so my crazy ass projects (like Final Zone BBS) will stay accessable. Hell, this past week I left the damned server that runs final zone off for really 8 days before turning it back on and restoring all the settings, I was that tired of it.
Now, you may ask, why don’t I just call AT&T about this? Well, honestly, it’s because my time is more valuable than what I’d gain from spending possibly hours explaining to clueless low-level tech support that they can’t just send me any gateway as my connection is through coaxial cable: they would likely, like most average people do, presume I actually have service through Comcast and just become completely useless at that stage. If you don’t understand that, in principle, any signal can be sent via most any medium – DSL doesn’t care if it’s going through a phone line or a fucking coaxial cable – then you don’t need to even be involved in the modern communications industry.
In short, I don’t expect anyone to actually understand the situation unless I spend possibly hours moving up the chain to still, potentially, be shit out of luck since I am actually not sure if there are any even remotely recently made VDSL gateway alternatives that have a coaxial connection.
Thus I’m left with main options — deal with it, which is what I’ve been doing, or possibly see what Comcast can offer, since they are still the only other practical option I have.
This is where things get interesting — the work I mentioned that the house would need for a connection via Comcast to happen? That’s actually been done – when a friend lived with us a few years ago he had Comcast service installed for himself so he and I could both game online without conflicts. It at least worked, once a new cable was ran and rigged up in the house, but it did have an issue of constantly cutting out on him (a common complaint with Comcast service in this area) for long periods of time, but I’m going to, once I have the time to actually call them and really set things up, inquire about this and if it’s been resolved: they have fixed some things out here, from what I can tell, but this neighborhood has been sorely neglected by both BellSouth / AT&T and Time Warner, now Comcast. I / my family has lived in this area for 30 years, I’d think I know how things have been and how they have degraded over the years.
Comcast’s current offerings do look nice, but I’ll have to take it with a grain of salt and, as mentioned above, I absolutely hate that company with a passion for previous experiences with them — it would be quite the dance with the devil for me to do business with them but, given the state of things, I may not have another option.
So, that’s the score. To those of you reading this who are on Final Zone, now you see what I’m dealing with. To others, well, I would imagine I’ve explained this well enough.