Zaralin's Zen

I was sure that this post was going to be a major rant. For about two years we have had on-and-off connection issues and, DAMMIT, it was affecting our raiding.

Some background: We have two choices here for internet, but because of service bundling, we would have to pay twice as much if we had to split the services.  We’ve had numerous tech calls/visits with no long-term solution.  We were guaranteed that the tech coming out this Saturday would be accompanied by the local area supervisor. If the supervisor didn’t show, we planned on sending the tech on his merry way and canceling our service on Monday.

Lo and behold, Ben, the tech, showed up totally unaware that we were supposed to have a supervisor as well.   He asked that we at least let him check out the immediate problem (3 days of absolutely horrible or no connection) while he was there.  Ok, fine, because we could do next to nothing and had missed another raid, why not.

But he didn’t pull out his meters and tell us “everything reads fine” and that “it must be your equipment” or “your router settings must be wrong”, or “you must have bad lines in the house”, etc. He sat down with us and asked us about the problems we had been having, what we had been told, and what had been done.

Then he called his “tech support for the techs” as many others had.  Guess what they said?  Yep, “it must be their equipment/router settings/bad lines” etc.  Ben was clearly annoyed, thanked them for their “help”, and hung up (really? WTH? did this guy care?).

Any of you out there fans of Ghost Hunters?  That was what Ben was.  At one point he even said the words, “I need to disprove this before I move on to the next thing.”  It was obvious that he didn’t intend to leave until he had resolved the issue.  Or maybe he was waiting for an invite to dinner – Mustafah was making his famous spaghetti at the time.

Then Ben started checking things out.  He found both the splitter coming into the house and the splitter going to the TVs and modems were BOTH configured improperly.  The teeny tiny TV in the upstairs bedroom was getting the “full” juice, the TV in the family room was getting the next chunk, and the modems were getting the “leftovers”.  WTH?  No one caught that before?

He corrected all that and amazingly we now had downstream power levels around +7.8 (up from -8.8) and the upstream power level dropped from 58 to about 37.   Seriously, I have never seen even ONE positive reading on the DS and the UP had always been between 54 and 58.

But Ben wasn’t done.  On our two computers, we checked the power levels and ran dueling speed and ping tests.  Hmmm.  The power levels and speeds were still fluctuating wildly.  Ben then found that there was one small section of the cable that was not new.  As he removed it, he found that it had a small kink and another small pinch.  He replaced it. Our internet stabilized.

Ben, we thank you from the bottom of our hearts/wallets.  You did what no one else was capable of doing for the last two years.  It is amazing that one man (person) can make a company, especially while many others are breaking it.  We even got a phone call from Ben a little while ago, checking to see if it was still working properly.

One man saved the internet.  Ben – we /salute you.