The title of this post is how I'm feeling at this point. Not surprisingly, the wiring infrastructure of Old Town is not the organized and simplified structure you'd probably find in most planned communities. Over the years the electric, phone, cable, and fiber optic services for Old Town have grown somewhat organically as the technologies have improved. While the city has kept up with things for the most part, this has left a bit of a hodge podge of above ground/underground services throughout the city.
King street and the first few blocks from King are largely underground services, while the residential areas are still largely above ground. So when a transformer exploded last week on King Street it meant some serious traffic delays for a little while, but no ugly wires overhead.
A few weeks ago we started to experience rather poor performance from our Internet service, or latency as it's commonly known. It seemed that each evening at around 6:30pm-7:30pm on weekdays our network speeds would drop from the usual of 30 mbps+ (very fast) down to about 0.2 mbps (very slow). After a few tweets to Comcast about the issues, they scheduled a tech to come out and take a look.
Just in case anyone out there has Comcast as their provider, if you ever have a problem, just tweet it to @ComcastCares. The service you will get via Twitter is far superior to the service you'll get by calling their 1-800-COMCAST number.
When the tech arrived and I took him into the basement to see the server rack and wiring setup he was immediately skeptical of our home's interior wiring. He said, "Who put this together?" I responded that I had done the install and he immediately assumed the entire interior wiring was amateur and the root cause of any poor performance I was experiencing.
Needless to say, after about 10 minutes of interior testing and eliminating variables, he decided the interior wiring was not to blame (yeah...no kidding, buddy!!!) and the root of the issues were in the exterior wiring. At one point, while he was on the phone testing things with a tech on the other end, I overheard him say, "I'm here at the customers...um...server rack...yeah...no, I'm serious...a full rack with patch panels...no, it's really well done, pretty sick...you should really see this...it's even got lights."
The tech determined that we have two issues. The first is the fact the wiring from the node to the house is 17 or more years old, and the second is the fact the node at the utility pole is really over crowded. Take a look at the rat's nest at the utility pole where the cable node originates.
A few days after our appointment Comcast came back out to replace the wire from the street to our house. I was happy about that, but it didn't totally take care of the issues. What it did do was to add another wire to the side of our house. Now this is what the side of our house looks like.
We now have six wires hanging on the side of our house, but we only need two (cable and electric). As you may know, I'm a total wire snob. What I mean by this is that I love wiring, like the network, cable, and speaker wiring I ran all through the house, but I absolutely HATE unnecessary wiring that hangs awkwardly, sits outside of the wall for all to see, and ultimately uglifies the area wherever it is seen. I've gone to great lengths to properly conceal any wiring inside of our house, so why not outside? I now have a goal to remove all but the necessary wiring on our home's exterior and beautify the side of our house in the process.
The secondary issue is the root cause of our slowness. We're connecting to the Comcast network via an "overcrowded node." In other words, too many people are accessing the internet at the same time in the evening and choking out our bandwidth. While the new wire they ran helps some, it's still well below what we're paying for. Is it any surprise? Just look at the mess of wires connecting near the middle of this photo.
You may have a hard time seeing it, but there are at least eight wires coming off of this one point, and this one point is shared among several other poles. The more permanent resolution to our issue is to change our network access point from this pole in front of our house, to an uncrowded pole at the back of our house. But the big problem with that, the tech wanted to run a wire over our backyard. Now, he doesn't know my wife, but I know my wife quite well, and if I ever okay someone running a wire over our backyard, she won't be a happy woman.
The technical skeptic in me doesn't totally trust this will really resolve the issues, and my concern is simply that Comcast has an under structured network infrastructure for the number of subscribers in the area. The sad news, we can't switch to FIOS (no matter how much I want to) as it isn't offered in our area. The really sad news, Comcast has a total wired monopoly in Old Town. The even sadder than sad news, there's a dark fiber line (a fiber optic line that isn't in use, but fully able to be used) sitting just outside of the front of our house. Why oh why can't I just use that for our Internet so we can have full gigabit speeds!!!!!
So now I need to come up with a plan. I need to figure out a way to run the new cable wire from the uncrowded pole to the cable box on the side of our house. I need to do it without running a wire above our backyard, without digging up the yard or alley, and without hindering the look of our backyard in any way. I have a plan that just might work. I'm going to try to hide the wire along the wall and behind the ivy. I think I can weave it into the ivy and make the ivy disguise the whole thing. We'll see how this goes, and if I can ultimately sell Wendy on the idea. The way she is, she'd prefer slow Internet access to an uglier backyard. Only time will tell.
Have you had any Internet speed nightmares? I know there are tons of stories to go around. Are you stuck as a Comcast or other cable company customer? Or are you one of the fortunate people where you have a choice of providers? Any thoughts or other ideas than running the wire behind the ivy? I'd love to hear some.
