Friday, September 30, 2005

DSL!

Well, it took a little bit, but here at Castle Basil we now have DSL. It took longer than I would have expected to get everything set up, but it eventually happened.

BellSouth took the order on Monday. And Bianca helped complete the order after Michelle and I were disconnected. The disconnection glitch was a bad sign, but Bianca got everything completed and was quite helpful with the setup. She said the modem would arrive Monday (10/3).

When the modem arrived 5 days early (Wednesday night, actually) I was excited and began the installation.

Then, glitches happened. It turns out one glitch was the phone jack I had installed. Okay, I didn't install it, but I did have to adjust the wiring on it, since it was set for to default to the second line of a two-line setup (which we no longer have). And, after swapping the wires, the jack worked when I plugged the phone in. But when I plugged the modem in, I must have not secured the connection.

Unfortunately, I didn't discover that until Thursday evening. Fortunately, I discovered it, and not a BellSouth technician. So, let's keep that our little secret.

Still, there was a problem with the modem. But the lady from BellSouth Fast Access was able to help me access it for reset (no, there were no instructions on how to do this in the box the modem came in). And I wish I had written down here name, because she was quite helpful and I'd like to thank her. I will thank Cornelius, who I contacted earlier in the day during a break at work. He confirmed that DSL was completely set up, so I wasn't wasting my time.

Anyway, once that happened, there was one little thing about the router I have that needed to be adjusted. And, it seemed, I couldn't follow the instructions on the PDF file to make that change. But Misty at Motorola support was eager to help and when the first thing she offered didn't work, she jumped right in to troubleshooting mode and after a little bit, the problem was discovered, the router settings were changed, and everything was set.

It turns out that sometimes this router doesn't always reconnect to the modem when changes are made. I ran into that later last night when I did something else that I needed to do. Now, that last step wasn't necessary to get back online, but it's something that I needed to do for a project I have in the future. Maybe more on that later. Maybe.

Anyway, all the the sales and tech support people at BellSouth (Michelle, Bianca, Cornelius, and the lady whose name I didn't write down) were very helpful, as was Misty from Motorola.

But there's one more person I'd like to thank: vw bug of One Happy Dog Speaks.

I was able to get some advice from her regarding the setup process. And there's one thing in particular that she shared with me that made the process work.

When I set up the DSL modem, I had to directly connect to the laptop via cable. Which is fine. But once the modem made the connection, it was looking for a machine with my laptop's MAC address.

When I did the original setup on the cable modem (the service we've dropped) I ran into the same problem, and the cable tech reset the signal on his end for it to work with the router.

But, vw bug of One Happy Dog Speaks told me that she was able to change her router settings so that it emulated her PC's MAC address. And I was able to do the same thing on mine. And that really made the final piece easy.

So, thank you, vw bug. Thank you very much.

And, if you want to thank her for me, too, keep in mind that she's the first blogger to take questions in the Blog Interviews. Go to her site and thank her for me, would you? And, if you have a question for her, go to the Blog Interviews page and submit a question. Remember, questions for her close at midnight tonight. And the interview will be posted next Saturday (10/8).

7 comments:

  1. Sweetie, I am so sorry to hear you had such problems!! I was sitting here all day scratching my head as to what was happeneing ... Took us an hour tops -- but we did pay for the phone guy to come out and switch the lines in the outlet prior to it arriving.

    Glad you're back :)

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  2. Nice to see you back on-line. Glad I was able to help in a small portion. Need my daily fix of Basil's blog!

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  3. Jo:
    Well, I was in a situation Thursday of not having my laptop with me at work, because it was in the middle of the DSL modem setup. So, being without Internet connectivity was not fun.

    Glad to be back. Thanks.

    vw bug:
    Thanks. And thanks for your help!

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  4. Way to go Basil! Getting broadband after having dial-up is so exciting! I wish I could experience that again. Well, maybe not.

    Do you know what your upload and download speeds are?

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  5. Did you opt for the 'wireless'?

    My mother has it and it is a very cool thing.

    There are promotionals for it too - usually they'll throw in the gear as an adjunct to the DSL setup. Check it out.

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  6. tyler:
    It's working pretty good. At least as far as I can tell. Got it finished last night and have been at work all day. But it's performing at nearly the advertised speeds. It says 1.5 Mbps DL and 256 Kbps UL. And three independent checks show it's almost making those speeds.

    It's a little bit faster than the cable modem we had, although their advertised speeds are the same. But cable speeds had fallen off recently. That and the high number of outages prompted the change. Plus one other feature that I'm still playing with.

    It's early still, but so far, we're happy with it.

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  7. Steel:
    Actually, we've had a wireless setup here at the house for a bit. Got a Motorola router with 4 ports and a wireless connection. I use the laptop all the time (including right now), and I have the 54 bps Netgear card in it. Plus the wife has a Netgear PCI card in her desktop.

    I'm with you: I love the wireless! And, yes, it's a secure network, not open.

    ReplyDelete

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