As you may know, I an a bandwidth-a-holic. We built a house two years ago. When my wife was out shopping for new homes, my only true criteria that I would bend on was that it had to be in the areas where Verizon was rolling out their Fiber Optic (FIOS) service. A good friend of mine and colleague on the TechNet Team, Keith (KingCobra) Combs was living in an other part of the rollout area and it was a race to see who was going to get their FIOS connection installed first. Well, the way it worked out, he had his connection installed a week or so prior to my installation and somehow he managed convince them to hook him up with the 30 mb down /5 mb upload pipe for the first 30 days. Eventually, we both ended up with the 15 / 2 connections when all was said and done.
Over the past two years, I've come to expect the lightening fast download speeds and often prefer to work from home because my connection is at least twice as fast than what I get when I am at the Microsoft office. The benefit of this connection has been great, especially when it comes to online gaming with Xbox Live. Playing with friends and family seems as if they are in the next room verses across town or even across country.
All was well until December, when I started noticing serious degradations in my connection stability and overall bandwidth speeds. My first instinct after running bandwidth tests from www.speedtest.net and www.speakeasy.net was to check the router for an update. So I headed out to Buffalo Tech's web site to see what was the latest and greatest upgrades they had to offer. I applied the latest update, rebooted and was sad to see no improvement in stability or bandwidth. After that test, I ended up waiting around 4-5 weeks to continue my troubleshooting since we were all heads down focusing on Launch Readiness and the Launch Events.
I finally got back into troubleshooting mode this week and decided to purchase a new wireless router to see if that made a difference (IE, an excuse to keep the boss (read wife), from busting my chops for expenses outside our budget). After talking to a couple internal folks about the latest and greatest gigabit wireless routers, I decided to go with the D-Link DIR-655 Xtreme N Gigabit Router. The fact that it was a Vista Approved and Xbox Live approved device made the decision an easy one.
I set it up and made all the necessary tweaks required for it to connect to the Verizon FIOS line and started testing the bandwidth. I was sad to see no improvement in performance over the 2 year old Buffalo Tech router it has replaced. I decided it was time to get my money's worth out of Verizon and play the end-user role of harassing the support tech with stupid user questions. The support line was great, I actually spoke to a human (it pays to know how to work your way through the automated assistant maze) and it was from their support center in Irving, Texas vs. some other part of the world. I was very impressed with the professionalism, yet witty sarcasm of the technician which made for an interesting 90 minute support call.
As you can imagine, their first question after having me use their various speed tests was "are you using the router we provided you"?, to which the answer was who would use a non-wireless router these days. We went round and round about how I needed to use their router, (which I had disposed of two years ago), but I finally won (THE CUSTOMER IS ALWAYS RIGHT, at least in this case) and we moved forward with the testing. I was able to prove my point by unplugging the router and plugging my laptop directly into the FIOS line and providing them some details on the download tests, network diagnostic reports, etc. (Yes Peter, contrary to your beliefs, I didn't have a lobotomy when I left product support).
As we continued the testing, I realized my connection was not only slow, but it was dropping the signal completely. The Cat 5e cable connection coming into the router dropped the connection each time I'd wiggle the cable. I thought this would be a quick fix because I had a second line ran from the telco drop in the house to the outside panel. At this point, I gave up and waited for them to send their service tech on site the next day as it was 1 am and I was going in circles with their support.
The next day when the VZ Technician showed up, I explained to him what was going on, he asked about the original D-Link that they provided, (which I'd pitched in the trash the day they gave it to me), and went about his quick testing. As most technicians, at least most good technicians know, its good to listen to the customer explain the issue, but don't take their word for it, test it and reproduce the problem yourself, which he did. He pulled out his Panasonic Toughbook and plugged in directly to the router. I walked through the tests I'd performed the previous night with the support staff on the phone and he noticed a similar response issue, granted his experience under XP, wasn't as noticeable as it was on my Vista system, but it was with a 150KB difference in performance, and when the connection is supposed to be 15 MB, 150 KB, is chump change.
The Technician was quick to point out that if the problem was with the connection being down, there was no real reason for him to be there and that it was likely a problem on their servers (of course the customer point this out to the support technician a day earlier didn't matter), and he would push the issue back to them to escalate.
This was fine and dandy, but the importance of my internet life still hung in the balance. We're not just talking the importance of being able to send email, we're talking extreme importance as bumping my kill ratio on Gears of War and other Extremely addicting online Xbox 360 games that can not be mentioned (yet)..
Unfortunately, this was where I had to leave it, and head to Seattle for an internal Tech Conference, then off to Maine and New Hampshire for Launch events so it will be yet another two weeks before I can get things moving again and push forth with my quest for bad azz bandwidth that is reliable. (If all else fails, I will get them to upgrade me to the business class line, but that will be a topic for another day).