I Know The Guy Who Owns This Place » Wired/Wireless Networking

Qwest: Epilogue

bryan — Sat, 23 May 2009 19:17:37 +0000

I received the first bill in the mail from Qwest, but before I could even open it, Steph had followed up with an email letting me know she'd taken care of the promised credit. Impressive follow-up from a customer they hadn't dealt with in a few weeks.

Qwest Service Survey: Those are all the questions we have today.

bryan — Sat, 02 May 2009 15:01:58 +0000

I clicked the survey I got from Qwest regarding how their service was on a techsupport call. Literally when I opened the survey the first, this is all I got: Guess they already got my feedback or didn't really want it. :)

Qwest + DIR-655 = No Windows Messenger

bryan — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 05:48:11 +0000

After many hours debugging, I traced it down to the combination of the Actiontec M1000 modem from Qwest and my D-Link DIR-655 Wireless N router . With those two together, I could get out to the Internet seemingly fine in Firefox, Skype and AIM, but could not connect to Windows Live. ... After a long, confused call with Qwest techsupport (she clearly had no idea what I was asking about) and a fair amount of Googling, I finally determined that my initial guess was correct: the Actiontec M1000 does not support DHCP reservations. ... The magic solution was this: Call Qwest to get my PPP password (you can get the user name on the M1000 screen) Configure the M1000 to be in RFC1483 Transparent Bridging Mode Reboot the Airport Extreme to get the PPPoE option you need Configure the Apple Airport Extreme with the PPPoE username and password from the M1000 Voila! You'll get connected with just a single NAT (the Apple router) which also supports DHCP reservations. So now, things are in great shape (I think): Windows Messenger is now running just fine over the Qwest connection.

Qwest Customer Service: Win. (Maybe they do change…)

bryan — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 00:56:24 +0000

Within an hour of the post, Steph, a Qwest customer service manager , direct replied to me on Twitter asking how she could help fix it. She did what I expected the folks on the phone to do when they missed my appointment: she took care of the professional install fee I was paying ($40) and worked to get me setup earlier than the next Saturday. I had to only deal with 2 more hours of waiting for the tech to arrive and hook it up instead of 4 or 5. It still wasn't quite a flawless execution from there on out, but they were professional, very prompt in answers to my questions and the timeline to the tech. ... I've called their techsupport since and have gotten a mixed bag: one guy was awesome, one guy wanted to make me quit right then.

Qwest Customer Service: Fail. (Something’s never change.)

bryan — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 17:00:11 +0000

She said she'd page the tech and have him call me to see if we could get it done before I had to be in the office for my 1:30pm meeting. ... Earliest the second customer service rep could make it happen was a week and a half later and, oh yeah of course, I have to wait again for another four-hour-maybe-they'll-show-this-time window. When I last had an issue with Comcast, they were all over getting it fixed and had someone out here within 48 hours on a Sunday to get it settled. ... Comcast gets that these days (they didn't use to back in the day), but Qwest still thinks like a big bell and puts the customer last, contrary to what their voiceover promotes ("We know your time is important to you...") I thought I'd push for broke on the customer service end and see if I could at least get the $40 professional installation fee they were charging credited back to me.

Qwest Fiber Internet Modem Options

bryan — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 02:01:54 +0000

I thought this was pretty amusing: You can buy the modem outright for $0.00. ... We're going to give Qwest a try; Comcast has been pretty bad at the new house. We get speeds around 1-2MB a fair amount of the time which makes Netflix on Demand pretty unusable. ... They make you check that: "I acknowledge that my system meets the minimum system requirements for Qwest Connnect® with MSN Premium or Windows Live. ... " I'm sure it'll all work with Mac, but if not, we'll be back to Comcast. Let's hope their professional installation is better than their website's explanation of it:

To quote The Fonz: “802.11aaaaa”

bryan — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 01:27:33 +0000

I believe I’ve gotten the 802.11a problems sorted out. There were several issues combined I think and I somewhat inadvertently got past them all: 1. The XBOX360 was too close to the TV & Tivo. That was hurting it’s wireless reception. 2. The -a router wasn’t responding to a web browser when it should have [...]

There’s hope for my NetShare

bryan — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 00:51:02 +0000

I was one of the lucky few folks who managed to get a copy of the NetShare iPhone application before Apple banned it. I’ve never been able to get it to actually work though so I’d pretty much given up on that idea until my trip last weekend. The gentleman next to me was also [...]

802.11Argh — Now the 802.11A lan has dropped in throughput

bryan — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 00:46:59 +0000

Well, I was all proud of myself for getting all the WDS issues sorted out until I tried to watch a movie on my XBOX360. I’ve had the recommended 802.11a hardware for a while and it’s worked great. Now it stutters and stops streaming. It’s so painful you can’t watch over it. So now I’m [...]

802.11n perf problem solved.

bryan — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 22:24:36 +0000

After some further digging, I think I sorted out the problem with our wi-fi setup. While the Airport Extreme is a 802.11n router, it will not run WDS in n mode. It limited the bandwidth to G levels (54mbps). Fortunately, I stumbled across this article that basically says to punt on WDS for n routers [...]