Still Worth Waiting?

If you go deep into the Musing archives, for whatever psychotic reason you might have to do so, you will find a Musing entitled “Some Things Are Worth Waiting For”.  This Musing was first posted in February 2000 and is still accessible at http://www.acuitive.com/musings/hmv3-2.htm.  In this Musing, I posed the age-old 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?

The Musing went on to describe the trials, tribulation and eventual joys I experienced in working with Pac Bell to get DSL service to my home. 

I recently sold that home and bought a new one.  Going into that process, the biggest stress I felt was not the prospect of selling my existing home and wondering what price I would get.  It was not choosing and negotiating for the new home or even signing up for a monstrous mortgage on it.  Nor was it cleaning up the old house, saying good-bye to old neighbors, moving out, or moving in.

The biggest stress was the uncertainly of getting broadband at the new house in a timely manner.  The DSL at my old house had been very reliable (after nine months of gestation).  What was it going to be like at my new house?

I considered going with a cable modem.  But I thought I was going to use DirectTV at the new house for entertainment, so I didn’t want to bring the cable company into the picture for data only. With much trepidation last May, I picked up the phone and called PacBell (now SBC) to transfer both my voice and DSL service. 

What a fool I felt like for having any fear!  The nice lady on the other end of the phone took all of my information, informed me that I could keep my existing phone numbers, and that DSL at the new house was only going to cost $29.95/month. (At the old house it had been more than $150/month. I had an unusually fast and unique service).  She said she could put all the work orders in and that I should expect a call from the DSL department in a few days to discuss the details of the DSL install.

Wonderful!  I took that off my list and focused on other move-related tasks, and waited for the SBC DSL people to call back.  I waited. And waited.  And waited. 

A few weeks later I decided to call them to see what was going on. The first person I talked to didn’t have any record of my previous service requests, but he assured me that the person he was going to forward me to would.  As you can guess, that person didn’t have any record either, so he forwarded me over to his “District Boola Boola manager” (or something like that).  The Boola Boola manager hemmed and hawed, and then told me straight out, “Here’s the thing, Mr. Hoover, we were on strike when you initially called.  Apparently the scabs – I’m sorry I mean replacement professionals – who took your call, didn’t bother to write anything down about your call!  So we need to start the process over”.

“Umm, OK, “I said with a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.

“So what’s your address?”  I gave it to him.

Then the Boola Boola manager said “Well, here’s the thing, Mr. Hoover” (I was learning to hate that phrase).  “SBC doesn’t even provide service to that address.  You need to call Verizon.  Have a good day, goodbye.”

In the meantime, I had learned that to install DirectTV at my new house was going to be a major project – akin to the building of the Chinese Wall, renovating the San Francisco airport, or fixing a pothole on Route 85.  So by now I knew I was going to be dealing with Comcast anyway.  So why not get broadband service from them as well?  In fact, why not go for the trifecta and get IP telephony service?  I’m not sure I can tell you why I didn’t do that.  But there are always details.  I found out that IP Telephony is not available where I live and that Comcast doesn’t “officially” support wireless LANs with-in the house yet. Also, I was still attracted to the possibility of keeping my home and FAX phone numbers the same, which has nothing to do with the DSL vs. Cable Modem decision except that it meant I had to call Verizon anyway, and I might as well make the most of it.

My call with Verizon was mostly encouraging.  I learned that I couldn’t port my phone numbers but I could get DSL service, I could get it quickly, and they would send me a DSL modem as well as a wired/wireless router (only 802.11b for now unfortunately –I was looking for 802.11g but that will come later). So I signed up. 

Now it was a matter of seeing whether Verizon’s delivery matched their promise.  They gave me a Service Date that was only a few days in the future.  Sure enough, before the Service Date, a Westell DSL modem with a bunch of filters arrived in the mail and then shortly thereafter a Linksys Broadband Router.  On the promised Service Date, I hooked these items up according to their simple – almost comic-book like – instructions, powered everything up and hoped for the best.  Voila!  It all worked.  I didn’t have to tweak or re-configure anything. 

The only beef I have with Verizon is that their service was too good. A few days later another DSL modem showed up in the mail.  I had to call them to figure out what that was all about.  In turns out they had provisioned DSL service for all my different phone lines in the house.  If I wanted to, I could have three different DSL links into my house! But it didn’t take too much to straighten that out. 

So what did I learn from all of this? 

1. It seems to me that broadband technology has definitely reached the masses. There was no way I could say that in 2000.  But now, while I don’t think my mom could have ordered up DSL and then installed it herself, I’m pretty sure my older sisters, who grew up slightly before the PC and networking age, could have.  That means that basically the whole baby boomer generation and succeeding ones are target customers.

2. Service Providers kinda sorta have their act together.  If they are not hampered by merging systems due to an acquisition or pretending that a strike is not hurting operations, they can actually provide service.  They can actually take a call, get the information right, dispatch equipment and installers on a coordinated schedule, and have relevant information available to a random Help Desk person when a call arrives from a subscriber or prospective subscriber.  Who ever would have thunk it?

3. Vendors have played their role by making the enabling equipment low enough in cost, yet reliable enough, and most importantly plug ‘n play so that the Service Providers and consumers have half a chance.  These aren’t sexy developments, but are critical ones for rapid expansion of the use of the technology, which is good for us all.

4. Serious and ubiquitous residential networking may actually be viable some day. 

The networking industry probably needs for a very large and robust residential/consumer market to emerge to catalyze a broader rebound.  Success in that arena hinges on meeting technical and business challenges that are far different than those tackled to date in building out the enterprise and service provider network infrastructures.  Although much more work is needed to provide greater capability and flexibility for home service-networks, the fact that residential broadband has become dependable and repetitive enough for large Service Providers to successfully support, bodes well for addressing the heightened home networking challenges to come.

(volume 7, number 9)