Want High Speed Fiber? Watch this First!
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- Опубліковано 14 жов 2024
- Dave explains modems, ISDN, T1, T3, DS3, DSL, Cable, Fiber and more in this episode covering the scary story of the installation of new 5 gigabit home fiber service. For my book about life on the autism spectrum, check out: amzn.to/49y4ULG
Follow me on Facebook at davepl where I post all the progress and projects not fit for full episodes!
Sorry about the random focus drift and the occasional harsh edit I had to do to cut around the worst of it! Not sure what went wrong with auto-focus, but will fix it!
Edit: Someone smart figured it out below! When I rock back in place (hello, autism) I uncover the little face of the panda on the toolbox behind me, and the camera grabs autofocus on it!
misbehaving cameras only add to the authenticity of the video. don't worry about it.
I actually came to here to comment about this-- not sure what kind of camera you are using--but apple and samsung is always touting "it's our best camera ever" in each model. (well, duh, i hope so), but i wish they'd add a feature of "focus lock" for people making videos. I know there's pro level manual focus available, but most users want to use auto focus. Once focus is set, then lock it-- so if something comes into frame for a moment, don't shift focus please. I see this a lot in videos where people are making something-- woodworking-- etc-- their hand will into frame for a moment and it'll completely shift focus....so annoying.
It's the little white toy on the desk behind you. The camera thinks it's a face and is focusing on it.
Hey! My wife is on the spectrum so no worries. Everything seemed great
@@soulvibe2007 Holy cow, you might just be a genius! It's a little panda and he's new this week, so it'd make perfect sense.
I work at an ISP. Many years ago, we used to provide a fax-to-email service where we'd give customers a fax number and any faxes sent to them would be emailed to an address of their choice. Anyway, the phone numbers terminated on a really old bit of ISDN kit we had at the office, provided by the local cable company. One day we had a power outage where the UPS failed and the ISDN kit completely lost all its configuration. We called the cableco and it turned out they only had one old guy ("Dennis") who could help because he still had the config for our kit on his old laptop from when he first set it up! Phew, service restored, customers happy again, all thanks to Dennis.
sending love OP, but man I used to hate your isp's service fax-to-email services. what a mess.
@@kr0my So did we :D
Can you shed any light on why my ISP (Spectrum) only provides 10mb upload? Plans available for residential are 300/10, 500/20, etc.)
Dennis--what a legend!
Back in the day, when VOIP phones (walled home phone services, not Teamspeak or Discord) were new.
My dad ran a company that only dealt with analog, aka the outgoing competition. However at the time VOIP was so unstable that EVERY VOIP selling company in the capital used hes services and had analog systems for their sellers phones because of stability. Yeah, they were selling VOIP, but using analog. Oh and my dad made allot on the markup for legacy hardware upkeep. LoL! Obviously it is not like that today, but for the time it was great...
I worked for a major phone company recently and it's amazing how many solutions rely on the one person who can fix it (the Dennis factor).
Dr. Dennis Factor, MD is an obstetrics & gynecology specialist in Dallas, TX and has over 62 years of experience in the medical field.
@@UmVtCg Laughing Out Loud!
we also had a dr. in telephony. If SIP systems went down, a hired gun so to speak. sadly he passed away a couple of years ago. youngsters nowadays don't learn old tech and it's even hard to get a junior network technician. It's sad really cuz it's a nice industry to work in and still lot's of fun to be had.
They say take the square root of the number of employees and that's how many people are doing half the stuff!
Yup. We somehow still have a PBX system in use and the only guy we could find that could fix it was 50 miles away after our last guy retired. Shows up each time it has problems and fixes it (always shows up hours late). We needed to go remote during Covid? Somehow the dude made it work with call forwarding and remote VOIP phones. Guy is so weird but also a bonafide wizard because when I go try and manage that software its straight out of the 80's.
I can't believe i sat and listened to a guy talk old tech and service installations for nearly 20mins.
and i enjoyed it a bunch! totally encapsulated the pains of ISPs over the years!
a stroll down memory lane for us old farts
I have an old AOL floppy around here somewhere.
Same. No need for upload bandwidth so switched to Starlink some time ago. Hope @davegarage could take a look into Starlink setup and Security and so on.
He had it easy. I tried early satilite service 25 yrs back and wireless broadband. The history of promised high speed service every few months made me crazy and even ended up with a few non working home interface boxes....
This video made me realize how rich he is. I knew he was well off since he worked for Microsoft and everything, but he seems to be living the high life
Oh my gosh, Dave. I was a field technician for a cellular phone company the last 23 years of my working life. When I started, the backhaul to every cell site were copper T1's. Some busy sites would have a dozen T1's coming in. I got really good at troubleshooting T-carrier problems, and often spent hours trying to convince the phone company that the problem was on their end and with their equipment. I had to laugh when you said the old tech's name was Dennis. Our local telco had an old T-carrier tech named Dennis! That guy forgot more than all their other techs combined ever learned. Great guy. Eventually he even gave me his personal phone number.
Thanks for a great video, as always.
I'm not waiting for a plumber. My toilet flushed just fine. 😊
I worked for a telco and my supervisor was a Dennis, and he had been with the company 35 years at that point. lol
Every ILEC POP had a Dennis, whatever his name was. The guy who knew where all the bodies were buried.
About a year ago, our Dennis stopped by my office and said, "hey, do you mind if I go down in your basement and collect a few of those T1 cards that are sitting there? My stash is running low." He remembered from 15 years ago that we had a bunch of T1s terminated in our building, and as various ones at other customer sites around town burned out, he'd scavenge replacements from his customers. It was safer for him to do it that way, than to collect them all back at the warehouse where someone would steal them or toss them out. He used to watch the trouble ticket queue and grab our tickets if he could, said he liked our coffee and the bathrooms in our office.
I started climbing telephone poles in 1984. I have worked for every major cable company, Telco and most every major fiber company as either a technician or a corporate executive.
To listen to your story was both humorous and heartbreaking. Mostly heartbreaking and completely avoidable with more honest communication, better equipment and technical skills by your numerous service providers.
You are a patient man my friend!
Best of luck with your UA-cam channel.
remember when political correctness went and calling them telephone poles was frowned on because there was other things running on them, like power, cable etc. are there still telephone lines anymore? Remember glass insulators on bare line telegraph poles?
By admitting that you have worked for every company your also admitting that you have gotten fired from every company.
@@pfifo_fast only in your pea brained mind
@@pfifo_fast Quite the opposite my friend. After my 18 year old girlfriend put a gun to her head and 90 days later my mother committed suicide, I quickly learned the value of my time and of my life.
I have never been fired from ANY of the jobs I spoke about. If you would like to compare resumes I am happy to do so. For you to judge me like that on a public forum without knowing me and what I have done to get to where I am in this life is an unfair judgment.
You are entitled to your opinion but until you have strapped into my WestCo boots and my Bashlin gaffs, you have no understanding of my technical skills, nor my abilities.
In 1997 I was appointed a seat on the FCC board of the ATSC (advanced telecommunications service commission) in Washington DC. As part of the digital encryption technology group.
Please share with us all your life story and technical skills?
@@pfifo_fast Not necessarily true. With the mergers, acquisitions, bankruptcies, downsizings, reorganizations, spinoffs, buyouts, and a couple others I'm sure I forgot, You dont have to be fired to work at a dozen companies.
I love the image of Dennis doing a wheelie & driving into the sunset, wire crimper in hand. Thank you for that.
Badass 😂😂😂
Watching this brought back a lot of memories. I used to be a network engineer for a Fibre-to-the-premise network, and was involved with a lot of telephony issues over VoIP. We made a lot of stuff work like your old PSTN/POTS gear, including - 30 year old pulse dialer security systems (using pulse-to-DTMF conversion), fax machines and custom medical dialer equipment, not to mention POTS telephones. It all ran over the fibre. The key to understanding and resolving failures in these types of scenarios is to perform a packet capture at the telco level to analyse the point of failure (this would be done by 'Dennis'). And because you can't always identify problems looking at signals on a screen, repetition of trial-and-error testing was necessary. Strategies vary, but as you mentioned, in-band and out-of-band approaches are common. Then you have variability in consumer equipment itself. Whilst one POTS phone may work, another may not when attached to the same ATA, simply because the voltage or lag in the signal lies just slightly out of spec compared to what the ATA can handle under the configured settings. Your issue where the gate gear stopped working after 20 minutes very much sounds like a keep-alive timeout that's failing somewhere. Dennis might like to examine the packet capture =) You also want to ensure that you're running a good quality media codec that can capture all the detail in modulated signals that may go in-band. If nuances in the modulated signals are lost, be it due to jitter, insufficient codec bandwidth, or compression, a transmission may fail. I wish you the best of luck and look on with fond memories of an age gone by for myself. =)
reminds me of the configuration for a sipura / linksys / Cisco SPA3102..
where you can configure to great depth, eg voltages, complex line impedances, ringing frequency + waveform, end-of-call detection methods (this device can be used not only as ATA, but both as 'station' or 'central office' (or what they call it), i.e. as a line to plug an analog phone into, as well as a device to plug into a phone line (simulating an analog phone). I had great fun playing with it (luckily I didn't use it in a professional capacity)
To do packet results you need a $20,000 JDSU OTDR which they do not hand out to techs. good luck getting the engineer to your residence.
@@nunninkav Yes, the company I worked for had several of them and the techs would use them as needed.
I appreciate the level of calm you have achieved, despite the inordinate amount of money, time, and frustration involved.
Wonder if the ISP being something other than telco or cable would improved things?
I've had time to calm down... had I made this video 3 months ago, it would have been a lot more angsty :-)
I knew exactly who you're talking about because I used to work for a company they did a merger with ~10 years ago. We were told it was to be an equitable 50/50 merger, but that turned out to be a lie. Their leadership came to our office, lied to our faces, and the very next day laid off almost every single employee in our entire company. Entire departments destroyed. So not a single thing you described surprises me one bit. And I won't be surprised at all if your service continues to get worse and your bills go up.
If you take one bit, you can never take a byte. Sorry, I'll get my coat.
Exactly I know who you are talking about I also had friend who lost their job too now they work for the cable company!
hmm i know a story about something like that in detroit recently
Ziply upgraded me from 50/50 to 100/100 for free and I've not had any problems with it. Xfinity on the other hand was terrible.
@@Horus9339 I'd like this comment, but it already has 8 likes.
I loved the trip down memory lane. I am an grouchy old retired IT guy, Network Admin. I was writing FORTRAN on punch cards. I had to use ssh or telnet to get into my unix account, or VAX account. Now THAT was a civilization gone with the wind... I miss writing those crazy little VAX batch files. Good times, and IYKYK
That fact that you said 'months' multiple times in this story is mind-bending. I would lose sleep trying to solve these issues, and I can't imagine enduring that for months; multiple times.
Yep it sucks. I recently had an issue with a WAN DHCP lease on my fiber line (3rd party router, yea I know) and didn't bother to even call support. I would have had to directly communicate with an engineer because of the technicalities of the issue that basic support is just not trained for. Put up with it for a few months and decided against pursuing the matter, it's a residential line anyway and technical stuff like this probably wouldn't even get acknowledged just because I was using a 3rd party router. But then why even offer DMZ+/passthrough on a residential fiber gateway device? :-/
@@karlwithak.can confirm this. I’m a technician at an isp. The people on the phone have a very basic understanding of the equipment.. they usually try to tell customers what is wrong and are usually incorrect
@@karlwithak. yeah good luck with that. I’ll tell you what, come in the field and I’ll show you just how wrong you are. Actually wish that was possible, perhaps to teach phone agents how rf works so they set reasonable expectations.
Yeah, I've seen the same thing. These technicians and phone support reps rarely know how to work with technical issues that aren't in their script or that aren't extremely common but they also don't need to know much about WAN, LAN, networking, or fiber to get that job and aren't extensively trained so basically it's the long time techs with experience that are the most effective. @@karlwithak.
My favorite issue was when the company I worked for moved off of using T1 lines over to using T3 lines.
When the T3 line that they had just installed a couple of months ago went down, the same guy that I had worked with on the T1 lines showed up again with a volt meter telling me that it was probably an issue with voltage because the building was at the end of the run.
I just "smiled" and waved at him as he walked into the closet to test the T3 line with a volt meter.
After a little bit of time passed I could hear him on his cell phone telling the head office that there was no voltage.
At that point, I walked into the closet and stated to the technician, "You do understand that the T3 line is fiber optic don't you?" he quickly responded, "Yeah, but I should still get the correct voltage".
At that point, I left the room and just laughed!
Needless to say, the T3 line remained down for a few days.
In this case, the old copper-savvy technicians didn't understand how to test and work with the fiber optic cables and services that the company was now selling.
I mean technically we still have photoelectric phenomena so if he brought a really sensitive voltmeter he might've gotten something... but I personally probably would've screamed because it breaks my faith in humanity whenever I know more about something than somebody who really should know more than me,
T3s or DS3s were typically delivered in a pair bnc coax copper connectors. They usually came off another loop, likely fiber and maybe an oc3 or similar. T3s were typically copper though.
This is story not about technichian, but about his company that could not teach their tech stuff to work with new technoligies... It us not a rocket science to set up and connect fiber network, especially with hardware standard for your company.
I used to work on T3/DS3 daily. Every one I've seen were handed off on coax.
We switched to digital phone service through our local phone company and every few weeks a phone would go down. We'd call repair and it would come back up. After several months, the repair guy told me the problem. Another tech would be testing circuits, didn't get a dial tone on our lines, and disconnect us.
I remember in the early 2000s getting Comcast @Home at 3MBit. Maybe a year later I was wondering why it felt slower and almost gaslit myself thinking it was never that fast. But sure enough, Comcast had cut the speed to 1.5MBit without telling anyone. Bastards.
Your deadpan delivery of a (painfully)hilarious story got you a sub. I had an ISDN with 2 B's back in the late 90s, good times...
I don't think that I have ever told a channel developer this before but, I really like your channel. Not only are your videos educational as well as entertaining, you are very easy to listen to. No wonder you have been so successful in you career. Congratulations.
Thanks for the kind words!
I am a radiologist that works from home and I have been trying to get fiber run to my neighborhood for several months now. When I asked one of my partners that had been through this process for advice he said it would be easier to just move to a neighborhood that had fiber service already. This video clinches it. Thanks for sharing.
Simple, pay for the $$$$/mo commercial/business service. Pretty much anyone will string fiber anywhere if paid to do it. But when people are only willing to pay sub-100$ for residential service, you get whatever you get.
@@jfbeam Long as it's reasonable, but there are the stories where it's the customer basically paying practically everything. At that point they should own it all, but...
@@jfbeam AT&T is the company that owns the fiber that literally runs next to my back yard. I have called them multiple times with the same results. I am transferred to multiple people who have no clue how to handle the situation, then told someone will call me back but no one ever does. Cost is not the issue.
@@Dick_Dawson_Rad AT&T commercial fiber, or residential fiber? Are you calling the "Uverse" office, or the enterprise sales office? Those are two very different things run by two very different organizations. The Uverse guys are useless, even for their own crap. The enterprise guys (usually) are not. (they know what they're selling, and their massive bonuses are tied to it.)
@@Dick_Dawson_Rad I've been in your situation. We moved into an existing home in the country and didn't realize there were zero options for internet service at the time. Even though there was old equipment on site (noticed when we looked at the home), no one was interested in connecting it. Everyone said "we don't service your area." I even inquired about running fiber to our home / and or neighbourhood as a new install, no dice.
Simply put, all the first level people in residential have no clue. None. We were fortunate, an internet company (not my first choice) came through a couple years later and ran fiber to the homes in our slightly rural area.
Being in the technology business and having done this for work, I can tell you the thing you need to do is contact your chosen companies business division and discuss the installation with them. The residential people can only work with areas they have availability listed on their maps. Even if that map stops one street away, they don't have the connections or determination to get the job done.
Several years ago, the company I worked for built a building and opened a new office. During the process one of our guys contacted the local internet company in the area and they said "that address is a field." He replied "it WAS a field, it is being built into an office building." The phone agent was clueless and couldn't go farther. I spoke to our sales rep for the business class internet we were currently using at the main location and a few months later we had a deal to get fiber to the site and their tech was asking me where on the building's blueprints it was going to land.
I’m quite a young guy, born in the 00’s. I used dial-up internet until about 2012. Then the 6Mbit upgrade happened in the house, and then 12Mbit on the same line which we still use today. I have resorted to using my phones hotspot to facilitate any kind of high bandwidth activities, peaks at about 200Mbps. Nobody else my age knows the dial-up connection “jingle”, or sharing the house phone and internet on the same line. I always felt this sort of experience made me more interested in tech
My wife used to refer to the 'jingle' as the 'warbling love call of the internet' damn, i dont miss those days. Im far enough out fo town that my access can be sketchy at times, but 'always on' is such an advantage .
Some of what you discussed was over my head. What I found fascinating was the willingness of the provider to leverage your capital layout for standard services to other users. That and the company’s inability to train technicians to know what they are providing the customer.
I’m a 62 year old geek in a company full of twenty somethings managed by thirty somethings. I’m a Dennis. As I tell the youngsters who wonder why I’m paid more to work less, “I’m paid for my years, not for my hours.” I teach tricks to a couple at a time till they decide to take the knowledge and move on to greener pastures. I keep telling the bosses they need to pick one and start paying him or her to stay since I’m an old fart and might decide to join Dave in working from my garage. Or go to that data center in the sky. In the mean time, it’s fun to be the old silverback.
Been there done that! I had a client with 4 locations moving from copper to fiber. They promised there was service, but didn't tell us until after the contract was signed that we needed to pay the cost of running the fiber into the buildings. We finally got contractors hired to run the conduits, and 20,000 unexpected dollars later, we finally -- got some service. Symmetrical speed is truly a wonderful thing -- makes response so much more snappy.
Had a similar experience with a CLEC. And we were in a multi-tenant commercial building in the CBD.
This is why I have a mix of pfsense and unifi. pfsense for my router/firewall and unifi for Switches/APs. Been rolling 10Gb for a while now and have a solid and stable setup! Built my own pfsense router vs buying one as I could add my own cards and change what I wanted.
Speaking as a person who's worked for a fiber ISP for around a decade now-- I enjoy this video a lot because it's a good reminder that other outfits are even more of a mess than we are. Very amusing seeing them have such familiar problems
Amazing storytelling Dave! This is the first time I've seen your channel and as IT Infra guy I really enjoyed the history refresher, technical details, road bumps, and personal victories you shared. I also felt the pain of your experience, some things never change.
The fact that you know about all the industry standards and how it all works is amazing. Imagine what it's like for most of us who are utterly dependent on the so called 'Experts' that show up to fix an issue. And yet you still had to go through what we ignorant folks go through, months of intermittent service, stuff working right up until the the service guy rounds the bend at the end of the street.
Your point about internet speed limits is an excellent one, and something most people just don't realize. It's why I have never bothered upgrading from the base FiOS package. They keep pressuring me to get me to upgrade, of course, telling me how much better my life will be. Marketing versus reality. I stick with reality.
@cweaver4080 seem what is mentioned in this video is due to a hybrid infrastructure issue (copper and fiber system), I work for Verizon and today's FiOS services is provided through a all fiber infrastructure. The only copper techs deal with is at the customer's house. You might be on an older system call BPON which speeds are limited due to older tech. Verizon is trying to merge their customers on that system to the new GPON systems that will give you speeds up to 1gig. If you experience pixelation on your TV service it could be due to BPON system, plus why would you like to stay on a legacy system will limits you I'm the future. Also copper infrastructure are more costly than those of fiber, so keep that in mind. And also I'm not here to upset you in anyway possible, I just would like to put some info out there. Tech nowadays is growing fast, so these older copper system are not as reliable as fiber.
Where i live we are being forced into fiber. Either you take fiber or you have no internet. Unless you use 4G/5G/satellite. Greets from the ever so perfect (not) Europe.
My problem is fiber is not available where i live so im stuck with 4G. They already took down copper and coax.
I am old enough to remember when Ben Franklin posted that quote on Prodigy.
My electric co-op decided to build a gigabit fiber network out here and they're running the lines alongside the power lines right now. We had dialup that never got above 24kbps and was more typically below until the end of 2008 when we were finally offered wireless data. I'm cautiously excited about the speed available out here going from the ~4mbps I just tested to,ideally, 250 times as much at a thousand.
The Unifi UDM SE will get you 3.5Gb with IDS/IPs enabled vs. the 2Gb you mentioned in the video for the UDM Pro. Disabling applications that are not used (protect, ...) will reclaim CPU and memory that will help with the routing so you can likely get more than 2Gb on the UDM Pro. I know you mentioned the cost being an issue for the 10Gb plan, but the service they offer is truly unmatched from a tech perspective for home usage. You get straight fiber from their border router to your router (no ONT, OLT), and the associated reduced latency alone are just amazing. You also get static addresses, and IPv6 dedicated ranges.
Here is your unifi based solution: The Unifi EFG will get you full wire speed with the 10Gb plan with IPS/IDS turned on. Pretty sweet. Too bad it only has an SFP28 port as that prevents signing up for the 50Gb plan but that's progress nonetheless.
I went through all those early modems plus one. My first modem was a 150 baud, cradle modem. You picked up the phone, dialed in, then put the handset in the two cupped cradle. For each of these, you had to set the parity, and number of stop bits. Getting each of these modems to talk to the dial-up service was challenging. I remember the tone sequence, as the modems switched speeds to find the highest one they’d both support. Thanks for the memories!!!
If you remember 150, you probably remember the TI Silent 700 terminal!
Bonus points for the WKRP clip with Dr. Johnny Fever! :-)
Dave I really feel the pain you had. Not only have I hosted servers at home and have suffered the bandwidth pain all the way back to shoving the handset into suction cups. What made it worse was that I was a senior tech for a large telco provider in the UK and I could not got the issues resolved even for my own service. I even went to the trouble of pulling a brand new 5 pair copper cable from the PCP to my home as the copper was so manky with many, many HR faults on the exchange side to.....
The worst part was having to go out to customers with issues like you described. No matter how much hard work you do and care you put in to your work as a tech your assurances to customers are only as good as the management, back end billing staff. I can't tell you how frustrating it can be when you know there is nothing wrong with the last mile and cable terminations on a circuit but the technical support teams on the phones just bounce the job back as a line fault because they simply could not be bothered to sort out the problem and it was easier to just bounce the job back.
The stress I suffered due to customers ripping me a new one was intense. I don't blame the customers for getting angry but having to hold back from saying
"OK sir I'm very sorry but there is no fault with your fibre or copper pair, the problem is that the management don't have a clue and the technical teams from another country don't know the difference between a com port and a car port"
It was so frustrating... I would have loved to tell the customers the truth but I needed my job. As you know yourself it matters not how well you do your job if the next person down the line is totally incompetent. I am glad you met a decent tech at last and your 100% right about the older tech. We had over 500 tech/installers in my area but only 4 of us that they simply called "specialist engineers". Most customers only met us after suffering years of being bounced from one department to another each blaming someone else. I'm my experience the bigger the company is the more this happens.
The UK and USA are supposed to be leaders in the tech world but we often have network infrastructure that is old and crusty. Many third world countries have a better last mile and network but we pay through the nose for it..,
I'm glad you got sorted in the end Dave .... as for the good old copper, you haven't lived until you have had your arms in a bundle of cables while soaking wet and you get the indescribable sensation that only comes when someone rings a circuit while it's touching your arm 🤯 ... better than a strong coffee 🤣
I work for this company, this is absolutely no suprise to me. I am a “Dennis” who now does both copper and fiber. I live with frustrations like this every day.
Your journey parallels mine, though at our current home we started here at about 9600 baud. We did multiple modem upgrades, the ISDN, even twin BRIs for a time (256K!) Then T1 and 2XT1. Our next step though was a 150 ft tower that provided wireless internet. In our case we jumped to 50Mb immediately then soon 100Mb. As a bonus for me, the provider's network gear literally sat in the rack next to our data center gear. A nice 6Ft Ethernet jumper and I had 4 ms round trip time from home to my equipment in the data center! Some years later our power company, a co-op, announced fiber coming to the home! As they had poles and rights of way, this would be easy. Or notsomoch. Turns out the government got all kinda cranky about adding fiber to the power poles that crossed stat and federal forest lands. (We guessed that in case the fiber fell the laser coming from the fiber could set the woods on fire. Those power lines are safe of course.) The goverment delay cost us 2 1/2 years for 'permitting'. But the good news is that this allowed the government to pour a lot of money into the local phone company so that they TOO would provide fiber to our home. Sure enough, after 30 years in our home, at least 5 with 'promised fiber' we got fiber internet from TWO providers in the same month. One at the back of the lot and one in the front yard. So you know, when you hear 'We're from the government, we're here to help." RUN!!
At one time during our journey one of the analog lines our modems were using ran across the ground and through the woods to the stree for months waiting to be burried. Eventually critters chewed them, they got water in them, and shorted out just enough to call 9-1-1. At 1AM on a Sunday morning. During the fiasco this generated hundreds of false 9-1-1 calls and eventually the sheriff showed up at the phone company and expressed his 'sincere desire for this to be fixed, and with the quickness.' That day, the phone company arrived and cut our wires - problem solved. (face palm)
Dave, you get to have all the fun. We live in an acreage community North of Houston. Because the houses are quite some distance apart I thought it was unlikely we would see fiber before I had to move into assisted living. But, lo and behold, I received a note from ATT that said I could get 1Gb fiber! So I signed up and within a couple weeks a tech came out, ran the fiber under the street through the woods and up to my IT closet. He installed the modem and got the link provisioned. He did the whole job in about 4 hours. Absolutely amazing. This was great, so we ordered fiber from ATT at our Makerspace. They installed the fiber into our building but do to some confusion in their system, could not install the modem or do the provisioning. That was a little over three weeks ago, and still no modem. It turns out they have a problem with our address in their provisioning system. So we wait..........
Thanks for the video and the macabre tech tale. An interview with Dennis makes perfect sense as a follow-up! The whole world could learn from his sojourn in the analogue desert.
As one of my company's 'Dennis', I have some ideas and Comments.
1 -- By a used Adtran 908 Series. You will not use the ISDN / T1 ports, but the Analogue ports have some of the better chipsets. Find out if your current provider will let you do something like that, or port the numbers to one that will.
2 -- There is a good reason why they want you off the old Analogue lines. A lot of the parts and equipment supporting copper lines are turning into unobtainium. Additionally, there are fewer and fewer people to work on it.
3 -- It looks like you are on an ONT 'mass market' infrastructure. Your bandwidth is shared. I do not know how much your internet is used for business, but you may want to upgrade to a Dedicated Internet / Business type service.
4 -- I remember using PLATO in 1980 with a 9600 baud private line allocating 1200 baud to each terminal.
5 -- How far is your gate? Could you connect your gate to your Panasonic phone system?
Back in the 1990's I had an extension of my Office Panasonic PBX over 6 miles of leased phone company wire to my house. The only time it failed was when power went out at the office and we realized the Panasonic interface box was not plugged into a UPS.
you remind me of my father. and thus, you are awesome! this video brings back the 90's for me which is some good memories and for that, i thank you. I also happen to be autistic, so i'll be grabbing your book.
Great explanation of the evolution of various telco data circuits. In my experience over the years, dealing with a telco when new technology comes around, there are always problems getting it installed and working. The only exception is when AT&T installed fiber service at our apartment community and it went smoothly, especially dealing with much older residents that demanded to keep their traditional POTS phones. Our local AT&T office had plenty of experience with moving retirement communities and high rises in our town over to fiber and had a team of support personnel that were able to work with residents who were resistant to change. ATA adapters were installed in apartments that customers had POTS service and they kept copper POTS active for the emergency phone in the elevator. The office had a special ATA installed for the fax machine.
Who age 60 plus can’t associate with this flashback and ISP stories we all experienced. Thanks Dave (& Dennis)
I had this up to stage 2 of your quest , at which time i told them to shove it .
B.T ( British Telecom ) would come out , replace everything , tell me all was well , show me it working , then leave .
What the were doing was testing it with the server down the road which had two banks , the public one and their own .
Theirs worked , the pleb one didn’t.
Took me 3 visits to prove it to them , as the last guy left i asked where he was going next.
“ To put you on the public device “ he said .
I asked him to return afterwards and he did, and went pale and stuttery , and left in a hurry , as my service shit the bed for the last time . 20 years since , never used em .
I was on Plusnet - a part of BT ! and had no problems @ 67mb/s down, 28mb/s up. Then the annual price hike came around.
Now I'm with BRSK for £2/month less then Plusnet, and get 530mb/s up and down + VOIP. Happy days 👍
Yep, I remember getting that “One Tech” for my ISDN install. He was the last tech in Florida certified and that was in the mid ‘90s.
The whole "it was faster to drive to work and download it there" definitely hit home 😂 I'm an Electrical Engineering grad student with an office on campus. My friends used to live right down the road and their landlord was a crusty ol guy who had the mindset of "eh the most basic internet plan will work". That basic plan was shared amongst like 5 people and all over an ancient wireless router. They were trying to download a new game to their PS5 at their house and it was downloading at like 5 Mbit. It was estimating total download time of around 8 hours.... I told them to cancel the download and lets go to my office. My office is in a new engineering building where each and every single RJ45 connection in the building is full gigabit (symmetric). Plus each floor has its own IT room with a dedicated fiber link. I don't know how fast those fiber links are but I have run 5 speed tests at the same time from one of the labs and all 5 gave 1Gig up and down. We plugged in their PS5 in my office and they game downloaded in like a minute. They were blown away 🤣
No it didn't, 5 Mb a second at 8 hours would be 18 GB of data, even on a full 1 Gb connection with zero playstation network bottlenecking, that would take a minimum of 2.5 minutes to download. At least make your story believable without including fabricated numbers.
We just dumped our T1 line last year (2023). It was primarily used for VoIP but also as an emergency connection in case our primary went out.
At a different office, we had the first "digital" line in the area -- Switch56! Took almost 6 months to get the telco to get it installed and working...then they retroactively billed us for 6 months of service.
Great story! I too loved my ISDN BRI back in the day. Shannon's theorem was not violated, BRI was 40Khz, 80Kbaud 2B1Q encoding to provide a symmetrical 160Kbps (DSL like) line. Two 64Kbps voice/data channels, 16Kbps call setup/signaling channel and another 16Kbps channel used for something I can't remember.
I live in the Swedish countryside and we have a co-op owning our fiber (I'm a secretary in the board of the co-op.) the cost of 500/500Gbit is about US$30/month and that includes 27 tv stations.
I also have a choice of about 20 Internet providers on this open fiber. Sweet deal!
Yep there is no free market in the USA
Excellent video, as always. I upgraded to fiber last year and had multiple challenges along the way - both technical and billing. The most frustrating part was the complete lack of intelligence from the people on the phone and the techs that showed up. They know how to do their specific tasks but cannot think independently. If it is not in the script, they are clueless. I wish we had more Dennisses in the world.
Ahhhh, a trip down memory lane. I was the 'network guy' as several companies over my career. My first communication device was a 300 baud acoustic coupled device. My last config was 10GBs switching for a server firm. Thanks for the 'scary' story, but I enjoyed it!
Thanks for sharing, a friend of mine had a similar experience 2 decades ago but with the electric company and he paid for service to be brought to a cottage and he paid quite a bit more because it was going through a lake. None of his neighbors helped pay but once installed they just had to sign up for service.
This is great history lesson. I lived through some very similar progressions while employed at a car dealership from 1995 to present. We endured solutions that began with 56k modems at each work station and progressed with DSL and multiple T1 connections. We were fortunate to be fairly close to a phone switch center. About fifteen years ago we went through a similar negotiation to bring fiber roughly 250 feet to our building. The same thing happened, where our investment made it possible for the provider to sell service to many of the neighboring businesses. We still have copper service live as our contract includes a backup solution in case of failure. I think we are using about 6 pairs out of 75 available. The backup proved golden a couple years ago when fiber was disrupted with a construction mishap several blocks away. Some of our neighbors had no internet for almost a week.
I've been working in IT since 1994 and I've been through all of these during my career. Crazy how far things have come. I also worked for all those companies you named off. Did a lot of work for Comcast, RCN, AT&T, Verizon, etc.
This is like the Unsolved Mysteries of fiber installs. Excellent presentation, thanks Dave!
Found your channel recently. As a retired network engineer in the telecom and data comm industry I ‘enjoyed’ listening to your historical perspective and challenges with converting your analog devices to a fiber network The last company I worked for first deployed fiber in 2009 and stated converting copper telephone service. Along with that our telephone switching systems were going to ‘soft’ switches. Anyway similar to what you experienced some of our unforeseen challenges were analog devices such as fax machines and medical reporting devices that just no longer worked but eventually got it all worked out. Good video you did a great job explaining the technology and the overhead required to run more sophisticated services.
That DTMF (dial-tone multifrequency) tone-deaf issue still occurs with different VoIP providers, especially in hybrid models. I've troubleshoot those a great deal. I identify with that.
Great video
LOL - classic! Worked for Ma since 1977 and your story touched my heart.
Take care of you and yours Dave.
mate your stories takes me back to mid-90s. I can't believe we had time for 56k modems back then. I recall hearing about T1 and T3 connections in chat rooms.
Hi Dave, another great video, for the Ubiquiti Consoles, they currently do not have an appliance yet with IDS/IPS that can go over 3.5gbps speeds. You can change it to another appliance firewall like a SonicWall or Cisco appliance then change all the Unifi devices to a cloud key. I've heard rumors that later this year they will be implementing a new enterprise dream machine, and I expect the speeds to reach 10gbps for IDS/IPS or at least half at 5gbps. But if I were you, I would wait otherwise it's going to be a big project and a hassle.
I run the same DMP. It'll be a long long time before they make a 5/10G capable DPI/IDS. What you can do, is offload your security work to a separate server. Build out a beefy box with a couple of 10G network cards and roll your own PFSense/Suricata install. UB's firewall is convenient but not all that great. Their Suricata install is also pretty plain vanilla. It's not as pretty as UB's graphs, but you'll get to have your cake and eat it too as far as speed and security.
I did the 300 baud with a Commodore 128 in 85. Later, my neighbor had T1s to his garage and we trenched PVC pipe through the sand underneath the street with fiber using a media converter in 97. I admire your patience and thankfully have never had issues like this personally but I've heard horror stories for many businesses.
That was pretty interesting to hear. In France we have a pretty good fiber coverage but cases like yours are making the last remaining percents very hard to switch from copper to fiber, and ISPs have to find solutions for all these edge cases. But the wide variety of edge cases is a fact of life that businesses like ISPs have to account for.
Excellent video Dave. Just so you know, Ubiquiti just released their Enterprise Fortress Gateway which can route up to 25Gbps (12Gbps with IDS/IPS)and would be a perfect match for your setup. It would also make a compelling UA-cam video.
As a former telecom tech I really enjoyed the history recap. As a former computer networking company guy (retired) I can relate to your support issues.
I just had a ticket for my job today with a similar yet confusing story from an ISP. My initial confusion was that they were simply refusing to address packet loss on their circuit. Upon further investigation with our vendor the ISP is forcing the upgrade to Fiber and abandoning all copper services.
Also looks like Unifi just came out with the Unifi Dream Machine Pro Max which supports those higher throughput capabilities with IDS/IPS. Best of luck with your new fancy Fiber!
I went through the similar ordeal but mine was more limited to just getting a fiber in with the same company to a cookie cutter subdivision probably a couple of miles from where you are Dave, initial fiber trenching conveniently skipped my house as it was towards the end of the road, it took sweet 12 months but they did do it in the end with a 100+ followups. my goal was to have a gigabit up/down, but I was pleasantly surprised that I can run everything to my expectation and more in just a 300/300 config thus saving the 20 bucks and it does make me chuckle to save that 20 for the initial year.. Fyi Dave this was absolutely amazing video and you are rockstar of technology, always a pleasure to watch you dig deep no matter the topic. and I wonder how many people stayed until the end on this one but I dig it.
I remember when I first got cable internet. It was 1998 and my sister worked for the cable company so I got to be one of the early adopters. Going from dial up to 3mb down was mind blowing.
Recently found your channel and love it. I am from the same era of acoustic modems and the generations of USR modems. I had a T-1 installed in my house when I was working for the big O. The phone company required me to provide the underground pipe from the street to my house. Its amazing that I'm living in Silicon Valley and can't get fibre because our area was built in the 70's. Looking forward to catch your other videos.
At the time the office had 2 T1 lines. I was weekend farming nearly 40 miles away. I saw the lineman with the fiber line at the street at highway. The farm house about half a mile from the point. Knowing how old the copper lines, I ask if we can get IDSL. He just happen to have the equipment and hardware in the truck. Except for rejoining the two back to four copper wire at the House. The line man called in a test. The house network went 5x faster. Except when it rain. Months later Central office sales called to upgrade to IDSL. Just available on your street. They didn't believe that we have it all ready.
There wasn't even a bill created for the street yet.
I work for an MSO, and we lay down fiber connections up to 100G ringed or 10G spoked. For your POTS line situation, we would install a Adtran 916e or 924e and it would provide D-Channels for PRI connections to legacy PBX's that accept a T1 connection and if analog lines are needed, we program it for up to 16 FXS lines on the 916 or 24 on the 924. Sucks that you had to go through all this.
Great video Dave. I live in a rural area & started with dial-up, then DSL (as the telcos were being bought & sold). Got my hopes high when time warner ran fiber down our street only to be disappointed after years of it swinging in the wind and the AOL merger was its demise. Then one day spectrum ran their fiber and the had 300 Mbps at a reasonable price and I was able to enjoy streaming & surfing at the same time without buffering.
OMG.
I just re-lived the last 25 years...
Being a " boomer" , coming back to KC from AK, just to get into computers, Telcom first. I had the pleasure solving those issues on both platforms. Just being aware of gates, alarms, modems, DTMF, analog to digital requirements . Dial up, T1s, fiber, PBXs, key systems...
See Telephony magazine " Pigs Can Fly"..Thanks for reving some merit to my experiences. I understood everything you shared. Merit to your experiences.
Other than the reference to US companies during the historics, it all brings back memories of my younger years here in Oz. Thanks for sharing Dave.
I have a fiber conversion from my ISP, and that's all from my ISP. I am allowed to use my own router, and not forced to use the super snooper from AT&T. I get .8G of 1G "service". I'm fine with it, 80% isn't bad all thing considered (no at&t😁). Thanks for another great video.
I have had cable internet at my current house since I moved here (about 20 years). Just recently, they told me that they were upgrading everyone to fiber. The upgrade worked flawlessly, with my home router being the bottleneck to speeds. I almost never need all the speed that I was sold though, so it's good enough for my needs. Also, I have no landline, and nothing that relies on copper or POTS to work, so ... yeah.
Sorry you had such a fun time getting everything working properly, and I'm glad for you that it eventually got sorted.
See you in the next video, Dave
Dave you are right about trading security for performance, keep the security high.
My cable internet was recently upgraded (I believe by enabling mid split) which changed it to 240 Mb/s up, we also have a modem (Hitron coda 56) which has a 2.5g Ethernet port which I can test at about 1400 Mb/s even on a 1200 Mb/s gigabit plus plan. I believe, mid split is enabled per head end so may not be available in all areas, and my previous modem wasn’t supported at the higher upload speed, but the cost of a modem upgrade has been well worth the price. Love the channel and thanks Dave!
Dave, your fiber experience exactly mirrors mine over the last 20 years with our local TV/internet/phone company. I have similar needs, since I administer a local cable TV channel. Having something installed and having it stop working REPEATEDLY over the following few weeks is a typical experience, whether fiber or copper. Since I am continuously using one of their services, and am quite sensitive to disruptions, I am the first person in my neighborhood to call when trouble hits, and I usually get the "we'll send a tech to your address next week" response even though I have diagnosed the problem as in THEIR back-end, NOT my location. And waiting a week for a (maybe) solution is never a viable option for home businesses. So I feel your pain, many times over!
Still got copper to the cabinet at max 54Mbps pegged at 49Mbps and 15Mbps up. A good solid line.
This gives us full 4K films, an electronic bookkeeper business, TV, kids/teens on gaming and general surfing with no problems.
The system went down owing to outside cable failure so we bought a portable router which runs at plus 450Mbps through satellite 4g and works well BUT there is no difference that we can see or hear over and above our current wired system which was restored after a few days.
Hey Dave. I also have ASD and enjoy your point of view. Glad the algorithm pointed out your Channel! Finally!
When I saw the camera focus on the background, I assumed it was chasing your chair moving backwards and just overran each time. But reading the face detection is probably more likely. Fun stuff!
I have an ISP story! Unfortunately it's not fiber related, but it is cable versus DSL. Was having a hell of a time service wise for a cable connection and me working in IT helped a bunch. I had top of the line equipment - Cisco switch and modem, and a SonicWall Router. This was for a 25/3 connection at the time. Internal people said it was my equipment and the techs would find nothing wrong and say it's not me. It took an Old School Tech to understand what was going on. This infighting went on for almost a year. So I looked into getting AT&T DSL. The map said I had service so called up for install. Unfortunately, the house was 3 years old on a row of new houses on a private street. They only ran power and coax. Our house was 600 ft away from the aerial power lines that had that sweet AT&T DSL. Would have run conduit through three different private properties to get service. Had quotes of about $7,000. So said nope cancel it! The Billing department didn't get the notice and long story short sent me to collections for not paying my bill for a DSL service that was activated months prior..
I've been a phone/VoIP/network tech for some time in my previous career, what you described is typical ISP behavior. It was a blast from the past to hear all the acronyms and device names. Thanks for the ride down nostalgia lane ;)
Im 55 Dave, You just described my life since the 80's and on...lol Well done, Im making my son watch this so he can appreciate the speeds we have today. 👍
Wow that's a crazy story! Thanks for sharing it. I live in town in my area and we recently got 1Gbps fiber. Mine is serviced my the local phone company (also my employer) so I have an easier time with issues than average people but still it took a long time for them to build out to my part of town. I can absolutely say I don't ever want to go back to DSL or dialup days. The 1Gbps (1.2 actually) is plenty for my needs and about all I can really expect to take advantage of with my UDM Pro anyhow. Good video and thanks again!
One of my early tech jobs was working for a systems integrator who also ran a small ISP for businesses offering always-on ISDN (and T1 services). One per once I was in the "engineer" side of the house was work paying for my ISDN to my small studio apartment in a converted garage. A couple other perks was that my Cisco router had two POTS ports on it and I had one number I would use for normal voice calls, and the other phone number of fax. So long as I only used one of the POTS ports at a time, my Internet connection never went offline, the speed just cut in half. As we controlled both sides of the connection, we enabled compression on the line, so it was actually faster than 128kbps. Compared to everyone else with dial-up, this was pretty rocking. A year later ADSL and cable models showed up, and we switched over.
There were about 15 situations where I would have thrown up my hands and bailed. I admire your persistence.
Years ago I worked for a cable company and several of the franchises that were run out of our offices had very rural areas. This was pre digital satellite so to watch TV you had either an antenna or cable. Some people were quoted prices up to $25,000 to have cable installed. In some cases there were right of way fees that had to be paid, poles installed and essentially a small distribution network designed, it wasn't just pull cable.
Im fairly knowledgeable about networking and such. I learned so much from this video. So many issues of machines not talking correctly to each other. Its be nice to see some standardization among ISPs.
Great video Dave! It brought back the memories of the frustration of dealing with telcos trying to fix network problems on ISDN. And I remember the 300 baud acoustic coupler modems and before that the 110 baud ... the PDP 11/34's and 11/70's. What your telco put you through with this installation was bad.
I feel your pain MS Dave! I ordered hundreds of these Heinz57 circuits for jobsite trailers as a construction company IT manager. It seems that these companies get so big it is hard to get your message from the peeps on the 800 number to the guy in the truck. My favorite install was a DSL circuit in BFE, N or S Dakota. The phone company had "Co-Op" in the name and I got the same guy on the phone every time I called the 800 number, whether it was for sales or support I think he even went out in the truck sometimes. The issues were always handled quickly and efficiently. At home I also progressed thru dial-up, ISDN, DSL, cable and fiber. Fiber was actually the best install and most reliable since, although I have never been able to receive a fax successfully over VoIP. Thanks for your interesting tech insights....and Task Manager too!
My first modem experience was with a portable TI paper terminal at 110 baud. At this time my company had a 12x1200 baud modem bank link to another site. Not sure why 12 modems, unless they were doing BCD or such. My first home modem was 300 from RatShack. Then a 1200. Then a 9600, which actually got about that speed. My first experience with fiber was in 1984(?) in Bangkok where the government was fiberizing a university/business district to make the country more competitive. At my prior house 25 years back, I got a radio link (19K?), which was pretty respectable for the time. Now we have direct fiber that keeps getting faster and cheaper. Either they call us with an offer, or we call them about any new offers. It's all good.
Thanks Dave. I now have to document the last time I heard ISDN.
My first modem was 1200 baud. Have 2G fiber now. For the amount of files I need to work with, it’s invaluable. Usually runs at 2.3 Gig up and down. We build our own systems. Michigan has really pushed the 5gig fiber. Service is excellent.
I live in Chattanooga, Tennessee, USA where the Electric Power Board (EPB) supplies to residents both internet and television over fiber. The internet has five plans: (1) 300 Mbps up/down at 57.99 monthly, (2) 1000 Mbps up/down at 67.99 monthly, (3) 2.5 Gbps up/down at 97.99 monthly, (4) 10 Gbps up/down at 299.00 monthly, and (5) 25 Gbps up/down at 1,500.00 monthly! They advertise "The World's Fastest Community-Wide Internet".
I used to help a buddy with a BBS outside of Athens Ga. We had Fido Net on our site before the internet was really running. We had the fastest Modem at 9600. But it was tough getting enough speed so we put up a Satellite dish to pull in the feed and actually supplied it to the Atlanta area.
Loved this video as it was a real trip down memory given how my early modem experienced mirrored Dave's (the 80's dial-up trauma is real). Absolutely loved switching to fiber and am spoiled rotten by it, though having the phone line literally cut was a nasty surprise. I can live without a landline like many who exclusively rely on their cellphone, but there are plenty of people who - like Dave - can't and were completely screwed.
The intros to your videos are some of the best I've seen! Thanks for being awesome -- well, except for the whole windows activation thing that didn't like me upgrading my system. :)
the jump from 33.6 to 56k was awesome, really noticeable. All the little local ISPs competing for our dollars, half were advertising 56k the other half were 56Flex. Ended up with an external 56k USR modem because you could reboot it without restarting your whole pc, which back then could take several minutes.
Your story is so familiar! We had that same company install fiber in our neighborhood about a year ago. My install was reasonably smooth, but some of my neighbors…man, the horror stories! One of the worst is that they told a neighbor they had to trench their own fiber run because it was too long. Oh, they also broke the power pole in one yard., then told them they had to replace their own pole. The entire neighborhood was a mess after this unnamed company was done. Then they kept billing for my old DSL. For 9 months, no matter how much I complained. Frustrating.
Hey... great video - wanted to research your "trade security for performance..." quote. It's actually "...trade liberty for temporary security, deserve neither and will lose both." But I get your point and it applies to Security and Performance in the digital world.
Take my sub! Well said. I found the DTMF capture and blip problem all over the place, even in software based PBX systems using analog phones. There's a HUGE balance issue between echoing and throughput. I eventually had to look at SIP anyway so even though I found the balance, it was digital time. I have to say, digital is MUCH easier post setup and has much more versatility, especially in regards to remote applications HOWEVER, the upfront cost is quite large at $200 per SIP phone and the time spent learning about it, even if you use a free PBX distro.
One of my favorite features of the SIP system is the barge intercom. If I want to broadcast a message to the whole house, I just tap a few buttons and start speaking. Every sip phone you choose will make the announcement. You can set up different groups or barge a single extension. Fun stuff! I know you can do that with the analog phones with the intercom feature but I found them to be very problematic, especially in updates to the PBX.
I was happy to put the POTS and copper behind me but learned a Jesus big sh*t tonne in the process.
Being a "techie" it was much, much faster than if it were some newbie who knew nothing about the ins and outs of how internet systems work. I salute you for having the patience to stay with it. Even then it must have been very frustrating.
Nice to remember those old days... thank you for reminder..
BTW... I still have US Robotics Courier V42 bis in the "nostalgy box", and it actualy worked at 56K giving me connection to office in the end of the 90-s (same modem was on the other side of the line).