Month: June 2013

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Fun With the Morons At Bell Mobility

Wow, Bell Mobility is just as bad as it ever was! They are just unbelievable. I have been trying to pay my bill for over three hours now.

1) I received the bill today. It is due tomorrow. It takes 5 days to process online payments. The other option is for me to drive 70KM round trip to a strong phone signal to call them with a credit card number, which I do NOT want them to have on file. Officially. Non-officially, I could go borrow a neighbour’s phone, but I still don’t want my card number on file. Last time I did that, they helped themselves to money without authorization. Thank goodness Mastercard set them straight.

2) I can’t create an online account. I used the credentials given to me when I set up the account, but they don’t work. I keep getting asked to create a new, stronger, password. I do that and they say that I’ve entered the wrong password.

3) I tried email chat. The guy ‘hung up’ on me. And, yes, I was being very polite and non-sarcastic. He gave me canned answers and just left.

4) Next bill, I will have late fees. They will refuse to waive them saying that the payment delay was my fault because I should have known the bill was coming and paid it ahead of time. This is what what both the landline and mobility branches would say way back when. This time, I am going to let them send me to collections for the late fees as I know the collection agency is going to be much more rational. I’m keeping all my evidence.

5) No email support. This is so there are no logs of conversations that the customer could use against them.

Whenever I hear complaints about Verizon, I just want to laugh because they are soooo easy to deal with. Registering with them and paying my first bill took all of five minutes. They are always helpful and side with the customer. Bell still thinks it has the monopoly in this country. And when it comes to a decent mobile bandwidth cap, they are right. And the government protects them, not the consumer.

I’m at the top of the hill, but for the first time, I can barely do anything up here either, including log into my bank to pay Bell Mobility. This is one of those days I want to chuck all my electronic devices into a lake and go move into a cave.

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You Can Stop the Signal

Last night, my internet connection just died. There was zero service. I thought the problem might be that the laptop battery was low so the booster wasn’t getting enough juice. I therefore ran the engine to get an extra boost of power, but to no avail. A half hour went by and I gave up.

The connection really sucks this morning, but at least I’m online. Again, the RSSI number means squat. I was streaming Netflix yesterday with no stutters at -113 and -96 this morning hasn’t been enough to do anything.

I am beginning to suspect that the Mifi is playing a role in all of this because it keeps going dormant, as per its logs. My first thought was that it goes dormant because of a loss of signal… but it does the same thing up the hill where I have a very, very strong signal. So I did some research on the Mifi, and, yup, that’s a common problem with it and the issue is not related to signal strength. The suggestion is to try tethering it to the computer rather than connecting over wifi. So that’s what I’m doing this morning.

I can accept having a slow connection because of being in a marginal cell area. That’s fine. I’m used to slow internet now. It’s not necessarily a bad thing since I am on limited bandwidth. If I have to go up the hill a few times a week to download files, that’s okay too. I mean, it’s only 7KM round trip. But the Vulcan in me cannot stand capriciousness, that is a connection that runs when it feels like it with no rhyme or reason. The illogical of that really grates on my nerves.

Unfortunately, I can’t return my current boosting equipment without paying a restocking fee. I would then be without internet until I can afford something else. So I have to live with what I bought, even if it’s obviously the wrong solution for where I am. Wilson sells supposedly ‘low loss’ cable extensions, so next time I am near civilization, I will pick some up and then try to get the antenna even higher.

I need to ask someone to come and look at the Mifi screen for me while I’m on the roof moving the antenna around since moving it to the roof isn’t possible because the booster needs to be plugged in.

So that’s the scoop on the internet and likely to be all that I have to say about that, unless I magically find a sweet spot where the RSSI soars to -60. I’m not holding my breath either.

Oh, and look at that. My first Bell Mobility bill just landed in my inbox. It’s due tomorrow and I need to allow 3 days for processing the payment. It’s nice to see that some things haven’t changed.

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A Redneck Kind of Day

The day’s weather kept improving as the morning marched on, so I headed over to C&C’s around noon to get as much water as I could lug in my buggy so that I could do a couple of loads of laundry. I can’t wait to have a proper clotheslines, never mind running water, but this worked just fine.

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Yes, I could take my laundry over to Laura’s anytime, but I really prefer to do laundry this way. It’s like when someone says they prefer to hand wash dishes rather than use a dishwasher.

Then, it was time to scavenge next door to find something with which to elevate my high gain antenna. Am I glad I didn’t glue anything to the roof of my RV. I wish I had bought the antenna model that doesn’t need a ground plane.

Anyway, several failed experiments later, I came up with the best solution based on what I what I found. I used two brooms, the lid from my soup pot, and lots of duct tape.

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First step, join the two brooms together.

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Next step, remove the handle from the pot lid exposing the screw.

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Then, make a hole in the top of the broom and screw the lid into it (I know, I’m a genius).

After, scramble up the ladder and attach the antenna to the pot lid and then the brooms to the ladder, all with one hand while the other holds the ladder. This exercise needs to be repeated a few times since the lid is not exactly flat, so the magnet doesn’t stick as well as it could.

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Final step, advise your blog readers that those electrical wires are nowhere near your crazy contraption and even if said crazy contraption were to blow over, there is zero risk of it catching in the wires.

Unfortunately, this exercise was for naught as my signal strength hasn’t changed (currently -111). I am going to try to find a perfectly flat and larger ‘ground plane’ and see if that helps. The trick is to find something light enough to not make the whole thing too top heavy (why my earlier prototypes failed).

This is as high as I can get the antenna with the amount of cable I have. I imagine that the signal degradation I’d get from extending the cable length to get the antenna higher would negate the value of the extended height.

I think the biggest frustration with my internet connection is that the numbers really mean squat. Sometimes, I can stream and do whatever at -111 and other times like right now, I have to wait 20 minutes for the internet to decide to start working at again at -103 and I’m glad I’m learning to copy and paste my posts to a text editor as I write them.

Bah, the internet’s not coming back. I have climbed back up on the roof, taken the antenna down, and put it back on the soup pot closer to the roof. Back to the drawing board I go. Not that bring the antenna back down helped at all. Nope, this internet connection is definitely sentient (as all internet connections are, btw, as per more than a decade’s worth of experience with crappy connections).

Some time later…

Now, I’ve got the pot duct-taped to the lid to provide a better ground plane and the pot is resting on the top of the ladder by way of its handles. I am averaging about -100 this way and have seen as high as -90, but no lower than -104 (currently -96). But before anybody (ie. me) gets excited, clouds rolled in and then rolled out. Clouds are determining the quality of my internet connection. *sighs*

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Saturday Morning Sundries

My Social Life

Yesterday evening, I headed over to Laura’s for Friday night canasta, not sure that it would happen since Charles and Caroline have a house full of guests. Well, the guests (two of Caroline’s sisters) came to learn how to play (so I was no longer the newbie) and another frequent attendee also materialized, as well as Charles. So we were seven around the table and we played in pairs. Caroline brought wine, Laura pulled out some sweets, and we played to just past midnight. It was a lot of fun!

The Weather

It was June first when I walked home last night. The walk was about a block. I was frozen solid when I came in and went to bed wearing flannel jammies, a sweatshirt, and heavy socks and I still woke up in the middle of the night to add another blanket.

Twenty Cents Well Spent

I hate when I think I need something, buy it, and realise that the need arose from a one-time occasion. That doesn’t happen much anymore, but when you have a kitchen full of cooking implements, it’s easy to think you can get by without certain things. Well, I have used my slotted spoon and splash guard several times since I bought them last week, so they were worth taking home!

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The splash guard is the exact size I need to cover my cast iron pan!

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Internet

It is very mercurial. I got up this morning and it was fine, not blazing fast but steady, and then it just… stopped. But I couldn’t even connect to the Mifi, so I figured I was having Mifi problems and rebooted it. But that didn’t help the connection. It came back when it wanted to. And it dropped out in the middle of this part of the post. No rhyme or reason at all.

Readers Mark and Jack sent me some helpful information over night about cable length and signal strength respectively. Jack said to go through all my menus and sub-menus until I found a numerical value for signal strength. I Googled something along the lines of “how to find signal strength MiFi 5792” and found instructions for an older model of Verizon Jetpack that gave me enough breadcrumbs to find the answer. It’s About –> Diagnostics and then you have to look for RSSI:

signal strength

The RSSI this morning has varied between -108 and the current -103 since I added an extra foot of height below the antenna. But even those that -103 is technically better than -108, I’m still experiencing the same unstable internet connection. I still have a couple of feet of cable, so I am going to try to get the antenna even higher and see if that helps.