Online Media Cultist

It was only earlier this week that I had achieved my version of a productivity nirvana in my apartment. After many months of frustration and terrible Internet connectivity issues, the bad times seemed to have been resolved and the sweet sweet wireless router was back in business, as I wax on about here in a piece lovingly titled “WiFi, Internet Connection Back, Life Is Good.”

And so it was, but it was not to be happily ever after. I woke up at 5 am on Thursday and noticed the connection was out. By tonight it was back on the phone with Speakeasy and new talk about setting timeframes for yet another service visit and a mythical “vendor meetup” between Covad and the phone company.

The long descent into madness began with intermittent connectivity issues with my cable broadband provider, Charter Communications, last summer. Six months later, I finally pulled the plug and moved onto Speakeasy, a highly recommended DSL provider.

I’m really at my wits end about what to do next. I’ve heard scant little about “air cards” that can pull some kind of wireless connection off a cellular phone network, and the little I’ve heard hasn’t been overwhelmingly positive. Other than that, I’m seriously considering attaching a long piece of string to an aluminum can and swinging it wildly toward the sky while petitioning the Internet Lords for forgiveness.

Unfortunately, this online media cultist ain’t much of a hardware guy (just ask my wife when it’s time to fix something around the house!). Anyone have any suggestions? I’d be very grateful, and it’s likely that there are many others who are experiencing ISP troubles as well.

One day I’ll have to lay it out in excruciating detail (if only for posterity), but suffice to say that for the moment my long personal nightmare seems to be over.

The Troubles began last summer. To quote myself from a piece I wrote last August called The World Gets Flatter, My Internet Gets Broker, And Google Gets More Big Brotherer:

Meanwhile, I’ve been experiencing what has been tenuously diagnosed as “intermittent connectivity issues” for more than a month now. In layman’s terms: sometimes I can access the Internet just fine from my cable broadband connection at home – and sometimes I can’t. The excruciating part is no one can seem to diagnose why I can’t, let alone fix it. This is where we get into some of the downside of the flat world: if you can’t tap in, you get left behind.

The vastly shortened version of the story: I eventually escalated matters with Charter Communications, my broadband provider, to the point where I was in personal contact with their “VP of Communications, Western Division.” This was much better, I found, than explaining over and over again to kindly but intermediate-level English speakers halfway around the globe that I can’t get a decent Internet connection. However, I realized through sleuthing out the situation that Charter was simply oversubscribed in my area and was incapable of providing me with a consistent Internet connection.

I’m an online media cultist. You take away the online part and I get right ornery.

I eventually moved onto a DSL provider called Speakeasy (they were recently acquired by Best Buy, as a matter of fact). They came highly recommended, and I was willing to pay a little bit more each month to lock in a decent connection.

Another few months of struggle ensued. The Speakeasy folks were and are way more helpful than Charter was, but they too are reliant on dispatching service reps that may or may not know what they’re doing. Multiple visits followed, culminating in a “vendor meet-up” between Covad, Speakeasy, and the local phone company that had the look and feel of a Washington-Moscow summit circa 1985.

Finally, only a slim month back, the DSL situation was resolved. It was then time to move onto the wireless network: the Holy Grail. It’s the Holy Grail because our great but tiny apartment (sometimes referred to as the Southern Fortress) shoehorns the office into our bedroom. Thus, real work gets done on the laptop in the “other room.”

This too proved to be a mini-quest of Excalibur-like proportions, but late tonight I was able to thread the needle – after calls to Speakeasy, a punch-in-the-gut $3.50/minute call to NetGear, and a run to Best Buy to pick up another wireless router – and get the network hooked up.

Now I’m on the couch, laptop sitting proudly on top of the “lapinator.” I watched The Apprentice while doing my bills, chattering and tweeting on Twitter, and cleaning up weekend e-mail.

Things are running the way I want them to for the first time since last July. Life is good. The online media cult is ready for action!