The Internet Finally Comes Home
We all know that you really can’t really experience the internet without broadband. Up until last Wednesday, my parents still used dial-up (only 30 hours a month on the same phone line as the one that we used for the phone). They finally decided to take the plunge and get cable internet. Unfortunately, our local cable provider, Time Warner, only offers broadband over cable if you sign up for digital cable service, which is about three tiers higher than my parents had. (This might be the first time that I would have preferred Comcast, who do not tie their cable broadband service to any tier of their cable television service.) As a bonus, they went ahead and signed up for digital voice service also.
They were scheduled to have the installation on last Wednesday. The installation guy showed up a day early for the installation, only to discover that he did not have the correct modem for our installation. He said that he would come back on Thursday to do the actual installation. I talked to my mom later that night (on the phone) and had the call get dropped. (Darn you Sprint!) When I went to call her back, I got a lovely "The number that you have dialed is not in service" message. Puzzled, I waited for my mom to call me back, which she did. After trying to call her from my grandma’s land line and my aunt’s cell (Verizon) with no luck, my mom called up Time Warner to find out what was wrong. It ends up that somehow our phone service had been turned off prematurely. How this still allowed calls to be placed still puzzles me.
The installation guy ended up showing up on Wednesday afternoon and completed the installation, including setting up our router (a lovely Linksys WRT54G) to provide a wireless signal to the rest of the house and giving us a USB wireless adapter. I took care of setting up the router (ie, changing the default password and SSID) and turning on wireless security (WPA-TKIP). (The installer couldn’t turn on the security for liability reasons.)
At the end of the day, this makes being home much easier since I am not forced to steal broadband from neighbors who leave their wireless access points unsecured.
