Technology Saved the day today

November 11 started just like any other day. But at 7:50 am as I was getting ready to start a full day of work despite it being Friday, my network appeared to have quit working. I looked over at my mesh router and saw a red light. “Oh CRAAAAAPPPP” I Greamed to no one in particular. Goan Scream. incase you were wondering what that word was… Anyway, I went to the main router where the internet comes in and that device too was stuck in red light city. A reboot of both did nothing for their status, so a reboot of the modem was needed. We had a pole out front and it was due to be changed today, I was hopeful I had a few problems in the past few weeks just as they started to investigate this pole and plan for the change out. So, the service stayed down after my modem reboot, you could see the online light was not lit up in any way. This is now a bad day getting worse. My work was getting backed up and my team was already down a person and that can be a challenge as it is. The guys show up to change out the Pole and as they disconnect our cable line, (It had to be taken off it was in the way of installing the new pole) They show us the cable and we can clearly see the issue… this cable was about 40 years old and had not been changed in all that time. It was so old the needle in a normal coaxial cable was gone. I should have taken a picture, but I just did not get to! So, they will reconnect everything, but they cannot promise ANYTHING will work. During all this I used the providers app to schedule an appointment for service and it said it could see an issue with my service. It was not an outage no one else on my street had any issues. My appointment was for Sunday afternoon from 4-6 pm. I also threw my name into the waiting list hat hoping for first thing Saturday Morning to get my service fixed. Now the new Pole is up, and all the cables are back to where they belong for now on the old pole. OH yeah, this crew puts the pole up… a 2nd crew and another company must come to move everything. (Nothing is ever simple!) After the line is reconnected, we have 1 working tv in my father’s room. He has the small old cable box that gets 13 channels. All he cared about was channel 7 for some news and to watch Jeopardy of course! Well, all the channels on his tv came up but jumped a lot and lost volume. Service was degraded quite a bit. We had no internet and no phones. The modem laughed at me with the same online light being out. The main tv worked at what ever channel it ended up on which was msnbc today. Probably from a car auction show the night before. So, we could not change the channel since the internet controls that part of the tv service with the provider… (They really do lock you in to need all their services) and any button press on the remote brought up the ever so helpful message that they are having trouble connecting to the internet and won’t we please check our connections and try again. So now not only is my work impacted but Dinnertime tv is now impacted. We now have a mountain, no mole hill here! Being a technology and gadget freak I had many options to try to get internet working for me and then steam some ABC TV for us to watch some shows in the evening. The best choice with the most advance options turned out to be my newest purchase aimed at trying to separate work and personal data further to make things easier, that device being the Microsoft Surface Duo! Thanks to ATT I live in a spot with 5G service and its pretty good in my house! I got 60 MB download speeds and 15MB upload speeds!

The upload speed added an extra 5MB onto my normal upload speed which was great as some of my work requires a public cloud connection with decent upload speeds. I set up the Surface Duo as a hot spot and connected my laptop to it. I ran my personal cell phone as the desk phone using the VOIP APP of my company to handle any calls. I ran like this all day and was able to help my team with support issues and help any customers without missing a beat. I use a remote connection tool and was able to remotely connect into machines and did not notice a performance difference at all. I had topped off the Surface Duo’s battery the night before, so I just left it there being a hot spot and it only went down to 60 percent battery life. Not bad! I even connected my printer to it so I could scan to PDF and it did that without any fuss at all. I ended my day at about 5:30 and shut down all the work stuff. I put the duo to sleep and turned off the hot spot. I was impressed. I went through the day and did not have to change my workflow much at all to be able to continue. In a normal situation I would have just went into the office to get the rest of the day done, but thanks to Technology I did not have to, that was a stress reliever in itself! As I prepped Dinner and started cooking, I knew I had to get ABC streaming some how so we could watch some news and shows. Luckily since my living room smart tv has limited apps to it, I needed something to get more content and I had just purchased a new apple tv last month. So, I planned on connecting the apple tv to the Surface as a hotspot and then running the ABC app. The connection worked as expected and within minutes my apple tv was on the hot spot at 5G! The ABC app had me sign in on my phone and verify my provider. I signed in and there we go, News at 6pm is on and steaming… And we steamed that way all through Primetime on ABC no stutter, no lag no jumps, just watched it like it was cable tv and a normal night. At 8pm we were done with TV so my father went to do his hobbies and I got an idea to see if I could play Grand theft auto 5 on 5G speeds! I connected my desktop to the surface duo and checked that I had internet and I did, ok let’s fire up Steam and GTA and here we go…. OH NO NOT GOOD>….. I got a message in the corner about double NAT something is wrong and could impact your play….. Essentially the way a cellular connection is made, the GTA game does not like that so it did not play well at all. I got on the game and was able to drive around, but I had no access to much else. I could not get my personal things or join any online missions. Ok it does not like that so we will quit that and forget that idea. How about Forza 7 Motorsports? Nope same thing. No access to anything. Gaming platforms do not like connecting through 5g hotspots. There could be some settings I would need to adjust to make it work, but it was only for one night. Because at this time I had gotten a text alert that a Saturday Morning appointment from 7 30 am to 9 am was open for me as long as I responded in the next, I don’t know how many minutes it said, I sent the letter Y for yes faster than I ever sent a text before! So, we were locked in for an early morning visit from comcast to fix our troubles. At 7 30 the next morning the technician was there checking all our lines out, I went out and spoke to him about what I was told and what we had going on, he looked at the line and said he will replace it, meanwhile he had another tech coming as he needed a line truck to replace a tap on the line as well. All of this was completed within 2 hours and by 9:30 I had full working service again. I had my full connection speeds of up to 600 download and 15 upload. The tv looked great and the home phone line was working. I later found out the tap we are on is an end tap, its just myself and my neighbor across the road. This answered my question as to why no one else in the neighborhood had any issues. Our service was restored in a very quick time frame, our technician was very polite and knowledgeable and answered questions while he did the repairs and neatly cleaned up. All in all, a much more pleasant experience than I have heard about from others. (some of the bad customer service stories are legendary!) I was pleased with the providers response and really pleased that technology helped keep us going during an outage and gave me hope that if they sort out all this 5G service, it might really be an upgrade we can all use.