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Hoov's Musings (volume 3, number 2) |
Some
Things Are Worth Waiting For
Mark Hoover,
President, Acuitive, Inc.
Question:
What takes about nine months to arrive, is excruciatingly
painful to deliver, completely changes your life when it arrives,
and is absolutely worth every second of suffering and every dollar
spent once it arrives?
Answer #1: DSL Service From Pac
Bell.
I have been suffering with 56K
dial-up access speeds for some time.
As a consultant who performs a significant amount of work
from home, I generally don’t get the advantage of LAN connection
speeds or even the high-speed WAN links that most of my clients
have. Software
downloads, document uploads, and e-mails from Dave Danielson could
take hours to send or receive.
System outages while such were in process could cause me to
have to start the whole process over again.
It is just a very painful interface to use for anything but
simple e-mail (no attachments) and basic web browsing.
This
is not news to anyone. And the various solutions to this problem (DSL,
Cable Modems, broadband wireless) are also well known.
But until 1999, I hadn’t taken the time to implement one of
those options, mostly because I was living a nomadic life, shifting
between California and Delaware on a regular basis.
Now that I have settled mostly into a new house in
California, I decided to take the plunge.
The
choice between cable modem service and DSL was the first decision I
had to make.
Since I am planning on hosting a load-balanced version of the
Acuitive web and e-mail server in my home, I wanted as much speed as
possible.
Pac Bell offers a high speed DSL service of 1.5-6.0 Mbps
downstream (into the house) and 384 Kbps upstream (away from the
house) dedicated bandwidth. I decided to go that route.
The upstream bandwidth was actually a more critical
consideration for me than the downstream bandwidth.
I tend to create large documents with a lot of graphics.
I don’t like to sit around for a long time as I send them
out.
My
wife and I bought a to-be-built tract house in April of 1999,
scheduled to be complete by the end of August.
I figured that if I got things lined up right, I could have
DSL service there soon after we moved in.
Wrong.
A
call to Pac Bell in May revealed that they couldn’t initiate a
work order because they couldn’t test the lines to the house
because such lines simply didn’t exist yet.
Fair
enough.
Could you at least give me an estimate of how my house was
away from the serving Central Office?
Also, do you use DLCs in that area?
-
“We can’t say until the lines are put in, and ……
huh?”
I
should have maybe switched to thinking Cable Modem at that point,
but I didn’t. Its kind of a techie neighborhood and I wasn’t
going to spend a bunch of money just to share bandwidth with my
neighbors doing stock research, downloading MP3 files, and playing
interactive gaming – never knowing exactly what performance I’d
get.
Pac
Bell told me I could order the service a couple of weeks before the
house was to be completed and I’d have the service up shortly
after moving in.
Wrong.
I
didn’t call before the house was built, because my wife and I were
on our honeymoon. So I waited until we were moved in.
Now - you can’t just call Pac Bell and order DSL service.
It’s a specialized enough service that you have to call
their specially-trained team that supports advanced services like
ISDN and DSL.
The
fact that ISDN and DSL were linked together as advanced services
should have been a clue to me.
I
didn’t get very far on call number one.
Three hours of waiting in the call queue was more than I
anticipated. I had to
go to a meeting.
I
got a lot farther on call number two because this time I had
planned. I set aside an afternoon, got a lunch in front of me with
plenty of water, and made the call.
After less than an hour, I actually was able to talk to a
human. “Could I
make an order?” “Well,
first we have to test your lines to make sure they can support the
service.” “Fair
enough,” I said, “but could I make a conditional order just so
if the test comes back OK we keep the process moving?”
“Oh no sir, we wouldn’t want to take your order not
knowing whether we could deliver the service or not.
We’ll leave you a message after we’ve done the test and
you can then call us back and make an order.
We’ll call you within five days.”
“But then I’ll have to wait for hours on the phone
again.” “Oh no sir, our average call response time is seven
minutes.”
Wrong
and wrong.
Five
days later – no call from Pac Bell.
Ten days later, no call from Pac Bell.
So I set aside another afternoon to call them. After a
sixty-five minute wait, I am able to talk to someone who tells me
that no line test request such as I am inquiring about was ever
ordered.
Since it is not in his records, it cannot be.
He is not even sure I exist, because his records show the
number I am calling about is in the name of Jill Hoover.
After some discussion to convince him that I do exist, he
agrees to re-order the tests. Well, re-order is my term.
Order them, is the way he puts it. Again, a promise of
hearing about the results in five days.
Wrong.
Seventeen
days later, I’m pretty much resigned to going with a Cable Modem
service.
But when I call TCI (I mean AT&T) on their special
Data-Over-Cable hot line I get put on hold and hear a tape loop
extolling the virtues of their digital cable offerings roughly 250
times.
Yikes!
I hang up and just for grins call the Pac Bell number and lo
and behold am talking to a person within two minutes!
I almost hung up because I figured it was a wrong number! And
even better – this person not only knew the results of my line
test, but also knew the results of the original one, which
apparently had been obtained only a day after I originally asked for
it.
Apparently,
I can choose any DSL service I want.
Well, that’s not quite true.
There are business services and home services. Which one am
I?
A business operating from home.
Hmmm.
Let me put you on hold…OK, my supervisor says you can order
any home service you want.
How many computers do you want to support?
Four?
OK- you have to order the extended service, and that means
you also have to order one of the higher speed services.
I’m OK with that, since I wanted the highest speed I could
get anyway.
Now,
sir, do you have a universal connecter on your computer?
Well, I think you mean USB, and yes I do on a couple of them,
but it doesn’t matter because I have a LAN in my house that I want
to connect the DSL to. A LAN?
Yes – 10BASE-T.
Hmm?
Ethernet.
Well. OK sir.
But do you have a universal connector on your computer?
We need to know so that we send out the right modem. I
don’t want a modem.
I want a router.
I want to connect up to a LAN.
I don’t think we do that.
Yes you do.
Here, tell me the list of CPE you have there to select from
and I’ll tell you which one I want.
CPE?
The choices of equipment that would go into my house.
I don’t think we can tell you that list sir.
I think you can.
It’s on your web site.
Here, let me take a look while we’re on the phone…there.
The Alcatel router. That’s what I want.
Well, sir, we do have an Alcatel Speed Home DSL modem, but no
router.
It’s a router. That’s what I want.
But sir, it’s not a router, it’s a modem.
OK! OK! OK!
I want a modem.
Give me the Alcatel modem!
But we have other modems that might be more suited to your
needs.
Do you have a universal port on your PC, sir?
AAAAAARRRRRGGHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!
Just give me the freakin’ Alcatel box!!
By
this time, I pretty much figured it wouldn’t make sense for me to
ask some of the questions I had about the implementation of the
service – DHCP or static IPs?
Access lists in the router?
Type of ATM encapsulation?
I figured I’d be on the phone for roughly twenty days if I
pursued those questions. I’ll take what they give me and work with
it.
But
then, surprisingly enough, when we compared schedules to initiate
the service, we didn’t have to go into Y3K to get a date.
We only had to schedule 12 days in the future!
But – they would be at the house anywhere in the tight
window of 8:00 am to 5:00 pm, and I had to be home when they
arrived.
Well, OK. I could live with that.
I’d just work at home that day. Besides, it was only a
nine-hour window. That could be better than the time you spend on
hold calling them.
In
theory, Pac Bell needs to come to the house twice to initiate DSL
service.
Once to provision the outside plant and once to install the
CPE and check the service out to make sure it is running.
The second of those is the one that needs to be scheduled
with the homeowner.
Sure
enough two days before the scheduled inside plant install date, I
get call on my cellular phone from the outside plant guy.
I just wanted to let you know that I’m going to be outside
your house today so that you wouldn’t be alarmed, because I look
like a homeless person and tend to scare people. I thought that was
pretty funny.
I asked him about the service and his procedures.
He was extremely bright, polite, and articulate.
I figured everything was cool and didn’t give it another
thought until 45 minutes later when my wife called me and said
“there’s a seedy looking person loitering outside of our
house!”
I explained to her that it was the Pac Bell guy and she
looked outside and sure enough, there was the Pac Bell truck.
Later, he rang the bell and introduced himself to my wife.
Apparently he was very nice. We’re having him and his wife over
for dinner soon.
So
things were looking good for Pac Bell service.
And they continued to look good when two days later, as
scheduled, the inside installer showed up at 8:25 am, with the
correct CPE in his hand.
He came into the garage, set up the Alcatel router (I’m
sorry – the Alcatel modem), and showed me, via a laptop PC
connected into the router, that the connection was working
perfectly.
Then he left.
End
of story, right?
Well not quite.
I
went to my home office to experience my new DSL service from my
computer – and it doesn’t work.
Well – I figure it must be my PC settings.
So I’m messing around with that when the doorbell rings.
I see a Pac Bell truck outside.
I open the door.
“Hi, I’m from Pac Bell.
I just wanted to let you know that I’m going to be here
today putting in your outside plant for your DSL service”. What
are you going to do that they didn’t do two days ago?
Huh?
To
make a long story a little less long, we discovered that Pac Bell
had initiated three work orders for my service. He was only the
second of three outside plant pre-provisioning people that would
have shown up had not sanity prevailed.
This
is not a union problem.
It’s mostly an Operational Support System problem, but also
a technological problem associated with any technology that requires
a truck roll (or two or three or four or five) to provision,
install, and initiate a residential service.
Another
problem with DSL is that you don’t really know what speed your
service is going to be until they install it. In my case, the 2nd
outside plant provisioning installer felt they needed to back off to
1.5 Mbps in order to have enough margin on the line. But that’s a
lower speed service, which would cost less but which is also
packaged with an upstream rate of only 128 Kbps.
I asked if I could get the 384 Kbps upstream rate combined
with the 1.5 Mbps downstream rate.
He consulted over the phone with the home office for about an
hour and came back with the simple answer of no. So – we agreed to
try the higher speed service set at 3 Mbps, although he warned me
that the margin was almost zero and therefore reliability may be
poor.
But I don’t
care. You know why? Because once Dave Logan discovered that the inside installer
had used the same cable to connect the router to my LAN as he had to
connect his laptop to the router, we figured out why my connection
wasn’t working (can you say “cross-over cable?).
And once I got the service working, I absolutely loved it.
Web pages pop up almost instantly. Software downloads that used to
take over an hour now take three or four minutes.
I’ve been able to download updates or patches to almost all
my software and my computer runs much better. I can do voice and
video conferencing easily. And so far the reliability has been excellent.
And
best of all, I am always connected.
I can receive e-mail in real time. I can track stocks and
news throughout the day. And
when baseball season starts, I can track each game and all of my
Fantasy league players pitch-by-pitch.
All
of this makes working out of the home office much, much more
efficient than dial-up networking.
In fact, the difference is night and day. Those of you who
only work occasionally from the home office may not appreciate it as
much. But for me, whose
home office is their office, broadband internet access is the best
efficiency tool I have come across in a long time.
Answer #2:
Justine Elizabeth Hoover
Born on 2/19/00
at 4:05 pm. Weighing in at seven pounds and five ounces.
She immediately stole her daddy’s heart.
Mother
and daughter are doing well – eating, sleeping, and pooping in
relative synchronicity.
(volume 3, number 2)
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Hoov's Musings |
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