Connectivity

GuyK (of CHARMING, JUST CHARMING) is experiencing trouble with his internet connection. ( The Roadrunner Has PMS ) and he talks about some of the problems he used to have with AOL, the bad old days of dial-up and using his Verizon antenna

The Aerie has wireless through a modem to our fiber optic phone line that also carries our TV signal. (Talk about multi tasking!) All through a little phone company that just about covers the northern half of Tioga County and part of Bradford as well. Very responsive customer service too. It’s not quite a Mom-and-Pop operation but it’s close.

I currently use AOL as my main service although I also use Firefox, Safari and Explorer. I could get by without AOL and will often use just Firefox as my browser at the Aerie, but I need AOL for its dial-up service and have had few problems with it although they seem to have forgotten (as most folks on the internet including yours truly have) that dial-up is slow as molasses when lots of graphics are involved. I don’t really need to use AOL at the Aerie but the story at the Bolt Hole is quite different.

The Bolt Hole has dial-up service through old wire phone lines. And it’s at the end of the line to boot so if there is ANY problem ANY where along the line…well, I’m screwed. Again, however, it’s a small, local company and they are pretty good about getting out to diagnose any problems and make repairs.

There’s no cell phone service at the Bolt Hole either, so using a Verizon antenna is out of the question. I’ve looked into one of those for when we are traveling but, hey, we’re not traveling so it’s on the wish list.

As a result, I use dial-up connection when at the Bolt Hole. If they ever run fiber optic phone lines (they have them in the nearby villages where the population makes it cost effective) or improve cell coverage with another tower (unlikely as there are vast swathes of Adirondack Park Forest where there are few roads and fewer residents adjacent to the Bolt Hole property), I might consider switching but for now my end-of-the-phone line cabin has to deal with the occasional bad splice that puts static on the line and causes me all kinds of headaches until the repairman can hustle out to fix the problem. (That happened twice last year with the bad wind storms in August that had trees down everywhere.)

I learned a couple of things from the repairman. If your signal on dial-up is dropped frequently it's usually due to noise (static) on the phone line. To check for static, lift the receiver and press 5. You should hear nothing. If there's ANY snap, crackle or pop there's static on the line. That noise will be read by your connection as a garbled message from your computer and cause it to drop you like a hot potato. As it is, 95% of the time the noise is on the company's line due to bad splices or a limb on the wire or something and not in your house. They will fix that for free and quite quickly if you have a good phone company. And the local company up North is quite good.

So, my email address still has that aol.com at the end and is likely to continue that way for some time. (Of course, even if I switch I can still use the mail service. No?)