I Knew This Would Happen

I hoped it wouldn't. I tried to convince myself it wouldn't. But in my heart I knew it would.

Earlier this month, my household switched from Starlink satellite Internet to Cox fiber Internet.  Personally, I didn't want to, but the rest of the family did, and it is cheaper, with a five-year price guarantee.

At the previous house, we had Cox -- not fiber, just standard cable -- and it came with frequent outages. Sometimes four minutes, sometimes four hours, sometimes longer, but I don't think we ever went more than a few days without one of at least noticeable length, at least over the last five years (it wasn't as frequent before that). Sometimes easily explained (bad storm, "hey, a truck just smacked a utility pole down the street, etc.), sometimes seemingly just because.

With Starlink, I noticed a grand total of one outage of more than a couple of seconds, lasting maybe a minute and a half, in six months (not counting times when the house power blinked or blacked out and the router had to reset).

Why that one noticeable outage? Who knows? Maybe a deer was wandering around the yard and decided to stand in front of the dish or something. According to the very nice stats report in the Starlink app, it did occasionally go down, for a second or two, but not for long enough to notice. It would temporarily go down for a couple of minutes when the router software updated, which it did automatically in the middle of the night (the user can choose the time) and I think it did that once (I only knew about it from the app report).

So yesterday I heard the old familiar refrain from the previous house: "DAD!!! THE INTERNET IS DOWN!!!"

Why yes, it was.

Called Cox's automated line, chose technical support. "We see that there's an outage in your neighborhood. Technicians are at work fixing the problem and we expect service to be restored by [six hours from then]."

It was only an hour or so -- Cox usually seems to highball their time estimates -- but I'm just going to guess this will be a frequent thing. I had hoped that everything being buried fiber, for several miles from the outer wall of our house to wherever it surfaces, would minimize the outages. Not as much wire that's subject to storm winds or drunk drivers. But it does come up to the surface somewhere, and there are servers, etc. to go down somewhere, and of course even the underground stuff can experience technical issues.

But you'd think that decades-old ISPs could have their technical problems more in hand than a seven-year-old service that literally has to send its signals to space and back.

I'm already missing Starlink. And yes, I did yell a little bit at certain people about why the hell they wanted so very badly to trade reliable Internet service for unreliable Internet service.