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Patch reliability is unclear. Unless you have an immediate, pressing need to install a specific patch, don't do it. |
ON SECURITY By Susan Bradley I live in a city with electricity, high-speed Internet, and all the other customary modern conveniences. In that same cit
[See the full post at: How my Internet outage caused security problems]
Susan Bradley Patch Lady/Prudent patcher
Rogers, a large internet provider in Canada, has different approach to wasps and hornets. When the Rogers “lawn wart”, the post in my lawn with the local distribution hub, was having issues, it was discovered that it had wasp nests. The Rogers technician brought a spray can of wasp and hornet killer out of his truck, sprayed the hub, dousing it generously, sat in his truck for 15 minutes, cleaned out the nests and went to work. You can spray the stuff from a respectful distance. No beekeeper necessary.
FYI, the Universal Service Fund, established by the Communications Act of 1934 was expanded to include financial incentive to bring internet access to the frontier with the Telecommunications Act of 1996.
In 2009, Congress pushed the FCC to develop the National Broadband Plan, with the goal of bringing broadband to the boonies. This led the FCC to churn out their USF/ICC Transformation Order in 2011.
This order included the provisions for the Connect America Fund. Somewhere along the lines of government doing what government does best, promulgating the endless drivel of programs with acronyms, the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) arose.
Long story longer, Starlink initially received funding/subsidy of $800 million “ish” from the RDOF to facilitate expanding broadband in the boonies. None-the-less, someone, somewhere, in the bureaucracy with just enough clout and power and a distain for anything scented with Musk, pulled the funding with the reasoning Starlink can’t prove that it can “deliver the promised service”.
Our wonderful tax dollars at work, and waste, on the whim of a frivolously fussy federal functionary.
Happens to me every so many years. I still have a landline. The squirrels eat the wire at the line connection. When the techs come out I tell them it’s the squirrels. They don’t believe me. They jump through hoops before finally giving up and listening to me and go to the source I originally told them about.
When there is no Internet I switch on my iPad with cellular (currently M2 iPad Pro 11″).
* I don’t use any streaming service. All streaming is local.
When there is no internet, I go do gardening, yard work or take a hike.
Funny you should mention Comcast (also “lovingly” referred to around here as ComCrap™).
In our neighborhood, our homes, built in the mid 1960’s are served for the full range of ComCrap™ services (cable TV, Internet, digital land line, etc.) via the exact same coax cables from when the predecessor owners of that cable TV first provided service over a half century ago at which point the coax cable being used was just sufficient to support Cable TV UHF and VHF channel transmission (and certainly not gigabit Ethernet, etc.)
Outages and/or “slowdowns” are fairly common. If you contact ComCrap™ customer service they continually deny that they problem is on their side. “The cabling in you house is probably the cause” is their usual response. Otherwise, they are willing to come out and check as a service call with the caveat that they charge mucho dollars for the service call if the problem is not in their infrastructure and that it may be days before they can come!!!
In my particular case, I guide the service person to my garage where their coax enters my home’s distribution box for Ethernet and cable TV and have them immediately connect their diagnostic tools to where the ComCrap™ interface. Typically they find a weak or in some cases a fairly intermittent signal. They follow the line back to the pole (they don’t have buried lines in my area) and the junction box at that location. After replacing the line to the house and “patching up” the connection at the junction box, the technicians readily admit that (1) the problem is definitely with ComCrap™ infrastructure, (2) that they recommend to ComCrap™ that they fully replace the existing lines and junction boxes, and (3) that ComCrap™ management never follows up to replace that aging infrastructure.
It is very sad.
But for what it is worth, we really don’t have a reasonable alternative in our neighborhood (in Silicon Valley of all places). AT&T (the American Telephone & Telegraph Corporation) still uses twisted pair wires to our homes, also dating back to the mid 1960’s.
I can only give our personal results with one site using Starlink in the middle of nowhere… YMMV… 24ms-28ms…
Compared to HughesNet Gen5, Starlink is significantly less.
HughesNet doesn’t give me a pretty graph with 30 days history, but if I open up a CMD prompt and ping it, it’s typically in the 500ms-700ms range.
Assuming you are with PG&E, if you keep your receipt and let them know the surge
took out your Microwave; they will often pay for the replacement. They replaced my TV when a ground hit the hotline
When there is no Internet I switch on my iPad with cellular (currently M2 iPad Pro 11″).
* I don’t use any streaming service. All streaming is local.
Same here, using smartphone too, with G5 cellular connection, that’s fast
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