Hello Cyberfriends! Our lovely goblin cave happens to be in an area that is undergoing a architectural face lift. Part of that face lift includes work installing fiberoptic internet in our area. Gone are the days of slow internet, so we were told. Cool, right? Right?
The jury is still out on the amazing glory of all things fiber. What the Goblin household has experienced is major lag, hours without any viable signal at all, and countless swearing matches with our router.
A small detail about the Goblin household, if you haven’t gathered it yet, is that Mr. Goblin and I are gamers. On weekends when Baby is asleep, you bet your bottom dollar if all household chores are done we’re playing something together. Since we are a cross platform couple, playing online is a must.
This past week and a half, we’ve struggled to load so much as social media posts from various devices. Basically, if it required a Wi-Fi connection, it’s ability to function has been spotty at best. Not only has it been frustrating as a gamer; it’s been a huge roadblock as a student and an amateur blogger.
At least in our corner of the map, there’s two choices for internet providers and while neither of them are awesome, we’ve had equally terrible experiences with both.
With the first one, we had a bad router that dropped it’s signal about every 15 minutes back when Mr. Goblin and I both worked from home during the stay at home orders. Obviously, that was a huge issue when our jobs required us to have stable internet connections for the durations of our staggered shifts. We’d have to try to work through lunches and put in overtime to make up for the time spent offline. After over a week’s worth of calls to their technical support and refusing to unleash my inner Rage Goblin being a call center escalations manager myself and studying for the CompTia A+ exam at the time, I was told that it’s completely normal to need to reset your router every 15 minutes.
Excuse me?
I kept my cool and called back 15 minutes later that day and spoke with a different agent who was able to confirm what I had tried to convince the company of for a week, that our router wasn’t working, and we had a new router installed and all was well.
Now, we’re using the other company available in our area partially because of that tech support nightmare, but primarily because of the billing structure and the data caps in place and the overage fees charged if you went past that data cap. That wasn’t a risk we could take when Mr. Goblin occasionally works from home, and the allure of the reliability and speeds with fiber were impossible to resist. We’re supposed to be getting up to 940 mbps, but we’re ecstatic to see our speed tests return 75.
75 isn’t necessarily anything to sneeze at sure, but lately we’re lucky to get 12. Hence the struggle to do anything online, it takes about 20 minutes just to get my email to load, forget doing almost anything else on my PC. Luckily, Mr. Goblin hasn’t had a work from home day in the while and most week days Baby and I are playing blocks or going for walks around the neighborhood, but it’s frustrating as a consumer. Granted, it’s “up to” but geesh. With that logic, we could be paying for the potential to get amazing speeds, but never actually see them.
We’ve had that issue with both companies, so it’s a rock and a hard place.
For those of you asking, what about just using your smartphones? Oh ho ho, we’re also only getting about 2 bars of signal at best. Since all of this started, I can’t get through a phone call with Grammie Goblin without a “Hello? Mom? Can you hear me?”
Is it just our family, or does anyone else seem to have internet issues that have followed them despite moving around a bit? Did we just irk a fellow adventurer who cursed us with poor connection for the remainder of our existence? Are ISPs in general just clever con artists? Is our part of the map growing faster than infrastructure can keep up with? I’m betting on the curse from the fellow adventurer. This goblin is off to find someone willing to help break this curse.
Slow internet should be a crime!