Last Updated on December 3, 2019 by Christopher G Mendla
Since we were in a neighborhood with some really old copper, we finally decided to abandon Speakeasy’s DSL after about 8 years of excellent service and uptime.
Verizon has been pushing their FIOS at just about every turn. We signed up and they started the install process. I have to say that the cable crew did an excellent job laying the fiber in our yard. It was a 75 yard run and it was hard to see where they had laid it when they were done. Everything was cleaned up completly.
The installer was great also. He was extremely polite and neat.
So, What’s the beef.. The first thing is that the router they provided seemed to be dying on arrival. I’d lose connectivity about twice a day necessitating a reboot. In some cases just port 80 traffic died, not email on port 25. In other cases, everything went down. I called support and during the troubleshooting process, the router was responding. They could not replace it until I had further problems. Wonderful. I was back to the ‘run to the basement and reboot the router’ twice a day routine. This is ok when you are in the house but a pain when you are out and trying to remote in with go2mypc.
The kicker was when I was getting ready to go on the road. Due to having to rebuild my laptop due to a failed hard drive, I was under a lot of pressure. The router decided to die almost completely. I called tech support and took the callback option. The problem was I didn’t respond to the callback voice prompt quickly enough and they hung up. During the second call they finally agreed to ship a new modem. If I wasn’t on the road, I would have lost connectivity from Friday through Monday. Stellar service wot? The source of the problem definitely pointed to the router when you consider that I am using the same internal network I had used without problems for the past 7 years. I started shutting equipment down to isolate the problem and everything pointed to the router.
I was going to just network my desktop and laptop via a switch but decided to just shut the router off and try in the morning. I got connectivity in the morning and was able to finish transferring the files and doing some last minute downloads. Most likely there is some type of heat related issue with the router and letting it acheive room temperature overnight got it running.
Now, here is the next problem. I had installed Outlook on my laptop and was running into all kinds of problems. One of them was a test message I sent to myself that came back saying the IP I was using to send was on a spam blacklist. Great. Due to the dynamic IP, I got the IP that was used by some idiot in a way that got the IP blacklisted The company that hosts my email server confirmed the blacklist status and submitted a bl removal. The fear I have is that some portion of my outgoing email will, from time to time, be rejected because my current IP will be on a blacklist.
I’m going to have to see if there is any software that will allow me to monitor the ip currently assigned to see if it is on any blacklists.