Hello World
I was sitting here last night when I noticed something.
I had put the new router for the new broadband on the floor. I had left it switched on and it was connected to the phone line but nothing else. Its wireless was running so I could see its control panel from my laptop but fuck all else, and there were two little lights gleaming – power and wireless.
Last night though it started to flash. I went over and another little light called DSL was blinking every so often. I checked the control panel but it still said no DSL or broadband. Maybe they were only half connecting me? Would I have to wait another week?
This morning I was up early [damned weird sleeping habits again!] and had a look at the router. It was still giving those little flashes and fuck all else.
I decided to investigate.
I discovered I had made a tiny mistake. There is a little splitter yoke, and I had plugged the phone into the router socket and the router into the phone socket. I switched them around. The DSL light stopped flashing and shone steadily and the one beside it marked "broadband" was now glowing as well. I checked the control panel and all was sweet.
You'd think that was the end of my troubles but it was only the start.
You see I had decided to stick the router in the sitting room instead of the junk room office, and all the cables radiated from the junk room office all around the house. But that was no longer the central hub. So I had to do a quare bit of re-running of cables. And then I had to run around reconfiguring everything as a lot of the settings had changed.
There were two devices I was concerned about. One was the Interweb radio Herself uses. If I left that without a signal it would be akin to sticking needles into a tiger. The other was her laptop. If she couldn't get into Farcebook then I might as well phone the Lads in White Coats now to collect her for the Happy House. Or else an ambulance for myself.
It's all nearly sorted now. The old connection is now unplugged and unused for the first time in years. The new system is running smoothly enough. I'm getting about four times the download speed and about one sixth up, which is something I'll have to get used to I suppose. Luckily I don't upload pirated videos?
All I have to do now is clear up the mess of cables everywhere.
I wonder when the fibre is coming?
Glad you finally got things sorted out and you'll just have to get used to having a fast broadband connection. I know it's a bother but you just need to stick to it.
Just a bit ago I bought a TP-Link basic wireless router in order to provide another source of wireless for the laptops that live downstairs (the computer room is upstairs). This new wireless router is hard wired via Ethernet cable into my Comcast "all-in-one" cable modem/wireless router which has had a bad time competing with all the wireless security cameras we've been forced to put up.
The Comcast thingy broadcasts wireless at 2.4 Ghz. The cameras (7 of them in all) also broadcast at 2.4 Ghz so the wireless connection downstairs on the laptops went from having a beautiful signal and downloading at 30 MB/s to a lousy signal and downloading at around 1.0 MB/s or less.
The new wireless router offers up a beautiful signal and starts downloading at around 30 MB/s and immediately craps out to to a speed of around 100 KB/s or less (yes, kilobytes per second). Too late I found out that the TP-Link firmware for that particular model is pure shit and is known for crapping out. The only solution is to install open source router software and reconfiguring everything which may or may not have been blocked by the FCC. As you say, I couldn't be arsed.
So I guess the only way to get back my downstairs wireless signal is to eliminate the reasons we had to put up the cameras in the first place. But I need to clean and oil my old rifle first.
So far so good. The speeds are constant and no interference from anywhere. It was really just a case of reverse feeding a few cables [the feed from the junk room to the satellite box is now a feed from the router [by the satellite box] to the junk room where it's split to feed an existing router at the other end of the house [for the second wifi channel]. It's simple enough but looks a right mess until I tidy the cables a bit.
If you want to know what router I now have it's a ZyXEL D1000.
I do a daily download of backups which used to take 2.5 to 3 minutes. It now takes less than a minute which is handy. One of the tiny benefits.