This morning, we woke up to a situation we’ve not experienced since Google Fibre was installed here at the Nerdery…an actual outage!
That red “Alarm” light on the fibre jack was certainly a surprise after many months of rock solid connectivity without Spectrum’s usual “we’ll re-partition our network every fortnight” (that needed a cable modem and router reboot) or the more rare “we’ll upload a brand new firmware on our side of the head-end and make all our routers puke”.
After many years of their “technical support” and “customer service”, I’d learnt the quickest way to restoration was often to recycle the cable modem and it either would come back up and work (network re-partition) or something ugly was happening upstream and there was really nothing to be done for it until they sorted out the fault.
Sadly, the usual fix was a big “NO JOY”. 🙁
Broadband internet service is much like insurance in that the promises made during the sale are ultimately irrelevant. You’re going to learn very quickly what kind of company you’re dealing with when it comes time to put in a trouble ticket or make a claim.
As I was making Alex’s breakfast and packing his lunch for school, I popped onto the Google Fibre app and opened a chat. They were quickly able to determine the fault required a truck to run over to the house and this is where I’m starting to get those icky and grody feelings wondering how many days I’m going to be stuck with backhauling my internal network over 4G LTE.
So imagine my shock when the agent proposed 1030 this morning!
Say what? You mean I don’t have to have an argument with dispatch that leaves me frustrated with blood pressure spiking through the roof after about a hour or two of unpleasant conversation?
Even better…there was none of these “service windows” where the tech might turn up at some unknown point in a 4-8 hour block of time. With that sorted, the agent logged off and sadly took the transcript of the conversation with him. Given how many times I’ve been on the wrong end of “can you prove our agent said *THAT*?!?” too many times for my liking, I like to have the transcript available so that there’s no doubt about what was said and promised. I’d love to see the chat feature enhanced to give you a button to download the transcript if you wish it or just go ahead and EMAIL it automatically when the agent closes their end of it.
Lo and behold, my newest best buddy turned up right on time. To be fair, if he was a hour or so late, I wouldn’t have fussed about it because I know that installations and troubleshooting/repairs often take longer than one expects. As long as I’m out of here by the time I need to collect the kids from school…I’ll be as flexible as possible.
He was able to quickly determine that we were getting light from the loop at the street to their network box (very good news…don’t want to have to trench a new connection!) but the cable run from the outside box to the fibre jack in the office wasn’t lit. This seemed a bit surprising to both of us…you wouldn’t expect that in a cable that hasn’t moved since it was laid round three sides of the house.
Next thing I know, he’s pulling a 50m run of cable off his truck and he’s going to re-install the run round to their box on the other side of the garage. I ended up helping him feed it through the hole in the wall to the outside (that fibre cable likes to kink badly after every 10m or so) and then it was a matter of sitting back and waiting for him to make the connection to the network interface.
Here’s where the really good techs come to play…he went ahead and connected the outside cabling and got light and network back and *THEN* went out to make it pretty (the weather’s penny dreadful but I’m sure he did a lovely job of it). I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen the techs do the exact opposite!
It was so nice being able to get back to doing something productive 45 minutes faster than I would have!
Our friend discovered the root cause of the fault was a clean break of the cable near one of the gutter downspouts in back. At the time we were thinking an adventurous and nasty squirrel had gotten at it but the more I’ve thought about how the tech said it was a tight turn where the break had occurred, I think what likely happened was that the high winds we’ve had occasionally these past few months essentially sawed the cable in two and the cut was on the corner of the house that typically sees the highest winds generally from the southwest.
It seemed so random that it was fine up until 0130 this morning and was buggered less than four hours later.
But that’s a mystery for another day…I’m still blown away that Google Fibre sorted it out so quickly with virtually zero stress for me and we were back on the air with a relatively minor loss of amenity. I was so not looking forward to a most unpleased oldest child who is expecting to watch the Hurricanes take on the Buffalo Sabres tonight on the telly.
For that and many reasons, I think you can colour me a very happy bunny! 🙂
