The day without the Internet

OK, maybe it was just a few hours without the Internet, but that isn’t as catchy a title.

To continue my story from yesterday, a tech came out today to swap out my cable modem and remove the filters from my cable so cable TV worked again. The tech came out and I thought everything would go smoothly. He said he’d remove the filters and call in to have the modem reset as that modem could be used for residential customers (learn something new everyday as I didn’t think it could). So the TV got fixed quickly and then when it came time to get the cable modem working, things went down hill. The tech quickly realized that I knew far more than him about networking, so he put me on speakerphone to talk to the guy at the office. The guy at the office was pretty good at following the script, but didn’t have a clue. When he asked what version of Windows I was running, I knew there was trouble. So the tech did all the troubleshooting of checking the cables, asked about splitters, etc. I, of course, knew this was a waste of time as the same cable modem (he didn’t swap it out, yet) worked 30 minutes before…the only difference is that I turned my router to DHCP; I even plugged my machine directly into the cable modem and only got a self-assigned address. The tech said that he could come back and replace the cables and I told him that it would be a waste of time to do that. Some miracle happened and the modem started working a little while later before the tech left, so I thought all was good.

At this point, my network was kind of a mess as I unplugged stuff to get things going and had only hooked my MacBook Pro into the cable modem. When I unplugged it and plugged in my Airport Extreme, it failed to get an IP address so I power cycled the modem as I thought it had grabbed the MAC address of my MacBook Pro and only wanted to dole out one IP address. The cable modem didn’t come back online. OK, I power cycled it again and called the cable company. Of course, I got no where and they put in a call to have the tech call me back. In the meantime, I unplug and plug stuff in and even put the cable modem at the first point where cable comes into my house to eliminate splitters (yes, I knew that wasn’t the problem, but wanted to have ammunition when the tech called back). No luck. I then plugged the cable modem back into my setup and moved the power cord and somehow it came back online. Perfect, so I unplug it and put the wire back and the modem didn’t come back online.

My wife got quite frustrated as she saw what I was going through and how I wasn’t working (which I don’t like to do), so she called the cable company back (now almost 5 pm) and got connected back to a local help desk person (the national help desk people are utterly useless). This person, Mike, really started digging into the problem. I explained that it wasn’t the tech’s fault, it wasn’t the wiring, and that it was a provisioning problem. He said that, yes they were having provisioning problems for the past 2 days and he’d try to send stuff to the modem. He managed to login to the modem, but it still wouldn’t provision (I learned that the modem re-provisions every time it power cycles and at other times when it re-syncs). He wasn’t all that familiar with the modem I had and I come to learn that it is only used in residential for people that pay $9.95 per month more for the home networking option. This option is for the completely clueless people that can’t setup a basic router even though just about all routers today are idiot proof. So while Mike is off researching something, the cable modem comes back online. Mike gets back on the phone and said that the tech that was out today was a television tech and didn’t know the data side so that kind of explains why he appeared clueless when it came to computers. Mike said that I could swap out the modem by going to their office or they could have a tech come out again. I told him that it was online and he was pretty shocked as he had never heard of that before.

So as long as I don’t unplug my cable modem, I should be good to go. However, I’m going to go down to their office on Friday (if they’re open) and swap out my cable modem so that the next time I have a problem, the support folks don’t scratch their heads trying to figure out why I have this modem/router without the home networking option.

I hope that I’m almost done with this fiasco; I thought a simple request could be handled quickly, but throw a comedy of errors, I ended up wasting a ton of time and getting quite frustrated. Up until yesterday, I had nothing, but good things to say about Time Warner Cable.