Another technology upgrade

Back in November, I posted about the installation of a fiber optic network in my apartment building, which didn’t extend to actually bringing the fiber into the apartments and hooking it up, since that was for the individual providers to take care of. I was left waiting to see what the next step would be, and it finally came when my phone/internet provider sent me e-mails announcing that they were going to discontinue use of the old copper phone lines and that I had to schedule a mandatory upgrade. I don’t trust links in e-mails, so even though the mails looked real enough, I waited to make my appointment until I got a print letter in the mail confirming it.

Yesterday was the big day. A couple of days earlier, they’d sent me a permission slip to print out and get the building manager to sign, since the tech would need permission to drill through the wall and such. I was pleased that the technician was on time, more or less, but it took several hours for him to get everything sorted out, including getting the managers to unlock the utility room, figuring out where the optical distribution hub was outside and how to hook up to it, etc. (It turned out that he didn’t need the signed permission slip after all, which might be why the manager acted as if she’d never seen one before.) As I expected, he had to drill through nine inches of wall to string the fiber in from outside, but that wasn’t nearly as noisy as the initial installation in November had been, which was a relief.

Watching the procedure was interesting. At one point, he taped the very thin fiber to a wooden rod to help him thread it through the hole, like a sewing needle writ large. (And then he accidentally pulled the fiber out and had to string it through again, which often happens to me in my infrequent attempts at sewing on lost buttons and such.) To attach the new fiber to the old, and then to the plug for the new wall unit, he had a machine that apparently lined up the fiber ends and fused them together, since it has to be optically clear. It had a screen that appeared to show a microscopic view of the fiber ends to ensure they were aligned and clean. He had a flexible, adhesive-backed channel that he stuck to the wall as a guide for the fiber. At first, I thought it was just double-sided tape that the fiber was stuck to, but on closer inspection, I see it’s got sort of a U-shaped cross section and the fiber is protected inside the central groove. That makes it feel a little less fragile.

Once the fiber was in place, the tech attached a big white box to my wall (I had to partially empty and move the bookcase by my desk so he could get in there); my landline phone and the new modem were then plugged into it. The modem is simply a white box, featureless except for the rear ports and the brand name, with a single white LED that shines through the plastic when it’s powered on. It’s quite different from my old modem with its multiple status lights; this time, the status lights are on the wall box. (Also, is the paradigm for tech design swinging back from black plastic to white plastic again? My old modem was black, as are pretty much all my devices except my new laptop, which is silver.)

The tech had me download a phone app with which I assigned my network name and password; fortunately he gave me enough advance warning that I had time to think of a password, something I hate doing. He had some trouble with the provider’s system not letting him scan in the new devices and register them as active, but they eventually went through, at which point the provider switched over my number to the new network so that the other phone I still had plugged into the copper line went dead. (So now I no longer have a landline in my bathroom in case of emergencies; I’ll just have to rely on my cell. Also, the fiber doesn’t provide power to the phone line the way the copper would. I’ve got both new devices plugged into the battery-backup side of my power strip, though I don’t know if that will be sufficient to maintain service in a power outage.)

At first, I tried putting the modem on my computer desk behind the monitor, but I found out pretty soon that the modem gets rather hot. So I decided to put it on top of the same cooling-fan platform that my mini-PC rests on. The wooden panel on the back of the computer desk made it tricky to move the modem without unplugging it, but I managed to lower it slowly by its cords until it touched gently down on the floor, whereupon I could easily lift it to the fan platform. It still feels warm to the touch, but mildly so compared to how it felt atop the desk. The cooling fan runs constantly even when the PC is off, which I considered a power-wasting annoyance before (it didn’t do that when it was attached to my old laptop), but now I’m grateful for it, since the modem’s active 24/7. (At the same time, I finally got around to swapping out my old USB hub that had to be plugged into an outlet for the one my sister sent me that doesn’t, so I freed up a space on my power strip.)

With the copper line now shut down, and the new fiber line coming in right next to my desk, I could finally get rid of the realllllly long phone cords I had looping around the edges of the room to get to the inconveniently positioned phone/internet jack in the hallway, and I no longer have to have the modem sitting on a bookshelf partway between the desk and the wall jack. I was glad to get rid of those, and I’m tempted to find something decorative that I can hang over the now-useless jack.

As for the new fiber internet service, it works well so far. Logging in my devices proved easy, and it turned out I didn’t need to log in my PC because it’s connected directly by ethernet cable instead of wifi, which the tech confirmed is faster. Some things on my PC, phone, and TV are distinctly faster now, but other things aren’t as fast as I expected, so I assume those must be slowdowns due to something other than connection speed, which registers in a speed test as hundreds of times faster than before. This morning, the Hulu app on my TV gave me an error message saying it couldn’t find my data and to check my network connection, but that was after the app loaded much faster than it usually has before, and I haven’t seen that message before. It might have had more to do with the TV not yet having fully loaded its own software, or something — an internal TV issue rather than a connection issue. Shows on Hulu also have higher image quality right from the start, when before they started off at lower resolution for the first few moments or so.

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In other news, I reported last time that my car battery had died in the cold. I took it into the garage last week, and they tested it and told me that it had just been drained and would work fine once they recharged it. But the next time I tried to drive it, just a few days later, it was dead again. So I made an appointment for a replacement battery, which was for today. (I almost made it for yesterday until I remembered the tech was coming that day.)

Last week, I had trouble getting the car to start with my portable jumpstarter battery pack, but I finally got it. This morning, I had comparable trouble, and after multiple attempts where it didn’t quite turn over, I noticed to my alarm that the jump battery pack was bulging outward, which I understand to be an explosion hazard. So I abandoned my attempts. Fortunately, there were a couple of people waiting in their cars nearby (one was waiting to pick up a friend, I don’t know about the other), and I was able to get some help getting a jumpstart. The first person I asked had a weak battery of his own and thus had to decline, and the second person was willing to help but had never jumped a car before. Luckily, the friend he was waiting for arrived and turned out to know a lot about cars, so he got us sorted out. Once I got to the garage, I asked them to safely dispose of the bulging battery pack (though I still have the mini-jumper cable that plugged into it, which is probably useless to me now because it can only plug into a pack of that design). It took them only minutes to swap out the car battery for a fresh one while I waited. Once I got home, I ordered a new jumpstarter pack online. I decided to shop for a more expensive, hopefully better-quality model (the old model doesn’t seem to be available anymore anyway), but fortunately I found one at a 50% discount, so it only cost a little more than the old one.

Before that, though, I had a bit of a scare. I found I couldn’t turn on the alarm with my key fob, and then couldn’t unlock the doors with it. Oh, no — was the new battery defective? Did my alternator fail? But when I unlocked the door manually and tried it, the engine went on fine, and what’s more, I had enabled the alarm after all, even though I couldn’t get the confirming horn beep. Apparently my fob battery just died between the first and second pushes of the lock button. So I’ve had to replace three batteries associated with my car on the same day — the actual car battery, the jump battery pack, and the fob battery. It’s a battery of batteries!