July 2010

Dear Client,

Last Friday Qwest was replacing an above-ground pedestal a block north of us and screwed it up.  They knocked out our T1 line as well as one of our voice lines.  It took them 5 hours to get the T1 back in operation and a day for the phone line.  I really wish they had competent techs.  While I haven’t kept accurate statistics, the outages we have had were caused by Qwest 30-40% of the time.

The good news is that Qwest and Century Telephone (CT) have agreed to merge (at least on paper—it appears that CT purchased Qwest).  CT has a much better reputation for customer service and the techs who fixed the connection last Friday are very impressed with CT’s commitment to enhancing the infrastructure…something Qwest dropped decades ago.

For us, though, it is too little, too late.  When our contract expires later this year we’ll be switching to a wireless carrier who can deliver a better connection for less money, cutting Qwest completely out of the loop.  We are looking forward to that cutover.
Other than the outage, we’ve had very few service issues this last month.  That’s the way it’s supposed to work, but it takes effort to get it to run that smoothly.

On the national front, there is renewed interest in re-allocating wireless spectrum to carrying data.  What this means in English is that historically there has been a lot of wasteful usage by the federal government of different bands of wireless frequencies, both by the government itself as well as licensed frequencies.  Based on current technology, these could be used for Internet access without adversely impacting the current uses today.  Since the federal government controls how the airwaves are used, it’s very slow for changes to occur.

Another month, more ingenious spam and hacking attempts make the news.  The bottom line is—you really need a decent antivirus package to protect yourself.  But you already know that.  Right?

We have made some changes to our dialup network which will require new phone #s and a slight change to the login ID for those using dialup.  We will be contacting you by phone to assist you in these updates.

On a personal note, the rabbit war locally has gone to new levels.  There are now so many that in one recent weekend I took out 18 in 3 days(!).  Geez.  We put up an electric fence around our garden but that doesn’t seem to be a significant deterrent.

Also had a bit of excitement around here last weekend.  Was helping our neighbor out by trimming the grass next to her fence in 2 pastures she has with my gas powered string trimmer.  I wrapped it up and looked back to find a grass fire had started in her dry grass and it was coming my way.  Got it put out with some help, but not before it burned about 2500 sq ft of pasture.  I haven’t moved that fast in decades.

Hope you have a great July 4th!

Sincerely,

Ben Conner