This post could be considered an update of a 2004 article, Cable Modem vs. DSL – From the San Francisco Bay to Tampa Bay That article compared DSL to Cable Modem service provisioning in two different locations. This was the era before smart phones, ubiquitous broadband, and TR-069 for remote management of CPE.
DSL was the only broadband option for most of Silicon Valley. Residents of the greater Tampa Bay area had a choice between DSL and Cable Modems. In the end, the purchase decision had little to do with, technology, speed, or price. The primary factor was the speed and ease of turning up service.
From Fiber to Fixed Wireless Access #
Fast-forward 20+ years to last April and in some ways nothing has changed.1 Once again, we were helping my 98-year-old figure out her Internet options. As background, she was in the process of upsizing (as absurd as it sounds) to a home less than a half-mile away. We found that the earliest her broadband connection could be moved would be a few weeks out. Additionally, this new connection no longer supported voice circuits, meaning a VoIP alternative would be needed for her call caption phone.
Since a nonagenarian can’t live without the Internet, we were lucky to find an alternative that allowed us to pick up the equipment at a local shop. The speed for this alternative was slower than the gigabit service she had, but still in the hundreds of megabits. Set-up was easy, she had no downtime due to the move, and the Internet worked great.
The only problem was that the router’s IP address homed to a different broadcast market. This resulted in the streaming TV service showing local broadcast channels from another market. This is frustrating for someone who wants the local news and not news from 500 miles away. After jumping through some hoops with the streaming application, we were able to reset the geographic location. All was well until Friday, the 13th.
The Friday the 13th Channel Mix Up = Switch Providers #
As we were going to dinner, my mom texted me suggesting the broadcast channels were streaming from another city. Where to begin? With the streaming service? With the broadband provider? Fortunately, there was still a slim memory of what we had done at set-up. A quick conversation with an AI agent confirmed my hazy memory and that the service provider was known for occasionally resetting IP addresses.
Sure enough, after about 15 minutes of troubleshooting and remembering what we did at set-up, we reset the geographic location and the local news was once again local. For someone not immersed in broadband and streaming technology, this would be an extremely frustrating issue and maybe impossibel to fix. Then, my mom asked me that important question, “How do we stop this from happening again?”
My answer was “switch provider”. Amazingly, the switch back to the previous service provider was all online and fairly simple. They provided options for a window for installation. It required a technican visit, but this time we had the luxury of being able to wait the week for the installation. Although the all-in cost is probably going to be 30% more per month than her previous option, that was secondary to the peace of mind knowing that her IP address will continue to be homed to her local market.
- Of course, speeds are almost 1000x greater and often delivered via fiber to the home networks. ↩︎
Leave a Reply