Hooray! My satellite internet is working... possibly even fixed if I'm lucky...
I have just spent the last 2 hours on the phone to tech support trying to change over modems... finally succeeded. You see I spent all last night from 5:00pm till 8:30 trying unsuccessfully, and all Sunday afternoon was similarly wasted.
The bit that worries me is that I'm not convinced the problem was in the modem in the first place...
About 2 months ago, I had a technician visit to sort my satellite out as it got beyond phone support. He changed a few settings and fixed a few little things that were not to his liking and got it going. He also found I had an old receiver (I think that's what its called - in front of the dish) that was prone to be unreliable, so he replaced it only to find the new one didn't work at all. So he put the old one back on and got everything going, and told me to ring if it gave any problems.
About 4 weeks ago I complained that I had no internet service at all during the off peak period and only intermittent service if at all late in the afternoon (say from 3pm to 6pm). This was diagnosed as a modem fault, but I was still a bit suss about the receiver... the problem appeared to me to be time related, possibly heavy dew and associated humidity (inside the receiver was my suspicion
).
The system improved greatly in the few days after the service call, not 100% reliable but we could work with it.
A day or two before IISAC the replacement modem arrived. No biggie, I'll worry about it after I get back. The old modem seemed to be behaving itself reasonably so I deferred the change till after I got back from the Snowy Ride...
Last Sunday (i.e. 3 weeks from the start of my holidays
), because I wanted to update iTunes for Lyn's new iPod touch... of course... the satellite fell over!
OK now's the time to bite the bullet and change it.
To my disgust, inside the modem box when I opened it I found a nasty note saying the old modem must be returned within 21 days or they'll charge me $250! Not happy about that... there was no mention of that before they sent it to me, and I wouldn't have been so laid back about the change-over if I knew.
So that started the 3 day wrestle with phone support to get the new modem installed
. The first day it got too hard and I was fobbed off with the weather excuse (light cloud, but apparently that was too much to do the white fella magic we were trying to do
). Yesterday afternoon was bright and sunny so they didn't get off so lightly, and I exhausted my technical supporter's abilities. She promised to get a level 2 support tech to ring me this arvo...
When no one rang by 6:30pm I decided to ring. Fortunately this time we had success.
In between trying to install the new modem, I have been reinstalling my old one which works relatively OK. I may have got a little blunt with yesterday's tech supporter when she told me not to do that.
Not as blunt (not abusive!
) as the online complaint I lodged, however, after my first attempt at an online complaint was timed out and dumped!
Fingers crossed the modem really was the problem and they know what they were talking about...
Al.
