I was ready to write a slam against Earthlink this morning. Twice they have lost my order for a new DSL modem. On the phone yesterday I grew quite testy.
But this morning the UPS guy showed up at my door, with a box from Earthlink. A DSL modem. Hooray!
Well, not hooray. First I had trouble getting it to go on. Turns out one of the plugs on my UPS was fried in Friday's lightning strike. Then I couldn't get the DSL light to go on, indicating the modem was working. After several hours on the phone (and several times on my knees) I was sent to a local Radio Shack for a DSL filter.
I had just installed the filter, and the green DSL light was still not there, when a miracle occurred.
It was a cable guy.
In my anger on the phone the previous day, I followed through on my threat to call the cable company. I told them I was a long-time cable subscriber (true) and asked how long it would take to get modem service. Three to five days, I was told. So I forgot about it.
Yet here on my doorstep was a cable guy, in a white truck, promising to have me on the Internet within minutes. Oh, frabjous day, calloo callay! I chortled as he worked.
But the install took longer than expected, and the explanation showed why I was wrong to curse Earthlink.
It seems that the lightning strike on Friday went through my phone line, into the Netopia modem-router I had been using for my DSL service, and then out via an Ethernet cable to my PC. While the power didn't go out, and the cable didn't go out, my Ethernet connection was still fried by a power surge through the phone line.
There is no way you can learn such things unless you have boots on the ground, people in trucks who can figure things out (in this case by plugging in a second cable modem, to see if that was the problem, then running my Internet connection via a USB port temporarily). Maybe, had my DSL come from BellSouth, this all could have been solved on Monday.
But for now, I'm a happy Comcast customer, and I'll worry about my network later.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for over 25 years and has covered the online world professionally since 1985. He founded the "Interactive Age Daily" for CMP Media, and has written for the Chicago Tribune, Advertising Age, and dozens of other publications over the years.
1. Thuktun on October 27, 2005 05:04 PM writes...
In our house, after a few situations like the one you've described, everything that comes into the house is filtered before it touches the computer network.
* Each PC has its own UPS to isolate it somewhat from grid power.
* Before we had broadband, we used the phone line filters on those UPS units between the wall socket and the PC.
* Since we've had broadband, the UPS in the networking closet protects the cable modem and router. The network line between router and cable modem goes through a 10BaseT-capable filter in that UPS.
As far as I can tell, aside from induced EMF on cables due to the magnetic fields from a lightning strike, or a direct strike to the house network, we're pretty much isolated.
Given the disparity between the prices, though, I'm unsure why our 52" HDTV doesn't have its own UPS yet. I should probably do that...
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