So over the past week or two, we have been running into times at the Consortium when, hey presto, it’s not a matter of various network contention slowing everything, but when our network connection actually seems to come down. It’s Zoomeriffic fun! (Or Teameriffic for Margie.)
This happens for a bit, then things come back after 3, 4, 5 minutes. Enough time to confirm that there are no outages in our area or anything silly like that.
I have also, during such times, unplugged, counted to 15, and replugged in the Netgear router (C6250!).
It never seemed to solve the problem, which usually self-corrected.
So, inspired by Doyce’s example, I have now ordered:
Fun fact: all of Amazon’s offers for it would take a week to arrive. I went to Best Buy, and they offered to have it at the Southglenn store … in a week … or a store 45 miles away … tomorrow … or at my house … Friday. So, logistics!
And, to boot, I’ll be looking to see how I can have it sit on the windowsill – thus avoiding the TV/entertainment center possible interference. I just need to be sure I have appropriate cable lengths, but I can play with that the next couple of days.
Over on the Xfinity side of things, I currently have “Extreme Pro Internet!” which ostensibly offers 500Mbps downloads.
According to Xfinity’s own tests, I’m getting 18-21 down, 12-13 up, latency 23ms.
When I go to the “Change Plan” menu item, I don’t see all the cool options to change my plan. The screen that comes up looks semi-normal – a contact-us link, some offers to upsell some things – but it’s actually got an URl of https://www.xfinity.com/error/buy/sorry?errorCode=DFPLN3002 and a window title of “Sorry | Xfinity”, all of which sounds kinda sketchy.
So I’ll need to contact them by phone or, just maybe, chat, tomorrow. Which would be even better if I weren’t in various back-to-back calls from 8:30 to 1pm. But we’ll make it work.
Bottom line, I have moderate confidence that we should be in good shape for Saturday night. But … who knows what might happen? Stay tuned!