I AM A POWER USER

There in the photograph is electronic detritus resulting from about three and a half hours that I am never, ever going to get back.

Long ago when cable internet became available I was an enthusiastic early adopter.  We had fast internet at work, I knew what it was like, dial up at home just wasn't going to be adequate.  I bought my own cable modem, had the cable installation guys come out and cable up my modem, and bingo, goodbye dial up.

All of that is to say that my cable modem was pretty old.

Recently my cable company, Comcast, (they call themselves Xfinity but who are they trying to fool?) has been sending me letters telling me that my cable modem wasn't providing me with the maximum opportunities that Comcast was ready to provide.  As for me, the service still seemed fine, I ignored the letters.

Until the last one.

Service on my modem will be discontinued as of December 2.

OK, I get the message.  That's the old modem on the right, the Xfinity letter center foreground with the power connection for the old modem sitting on the letter.

So I did the research and bought a new modem (DOCSIS 3.0 for those keeping score).  I learned from the new modem installation instructions, NOT from Comcast, that after plugging everything in I would have to call my "cable provider" to be "activated".

Who doesn't love calling the "cable provider"?

Several rounds of providing my 10 digit phone number, my street address, my name, and the last four of my social security number followed by one accidental hang up by me (user error, cheek on the off button on the wireless handset) I was activated.  To discover that I did not have internet access.  The tech I was on with at that moment gave me the number to call Xfinity tech support.

A couple more rounds of (see above) and the tech was able to deduce what I could already tell from sitting in front of my computer watching the lights on the modem and the wireless connectivity icon in the desktop tray that my modem had been successfully activated but that it was not communicating with my wireless router (that's it on the left side of the pile).

He said I would have to contact the manufacturer of the router.  When I expressed my frustration with the fact that to this point I had only followed the desires of my "cable provider" and that the results of that course of action was that they had crashed my system he offered to switch me over to the special double secret level of Xfinity tech support.

He forwarded my call.

A couple more rounds of see above.

Then a recorded message that they were too busy right now to take my call, please call back later.

This is what is referred to as a "service industry".

Recognizing that I was now totally on my own I set off on the power user's trajectory, trying to fix my wireless router without any interference from my "cable provider".

The old router was only "801b" capable, we all know what that means, right?  It was an extremely aged router, probably every bit as old as the DOCSIS 1.0 router.

I have known for a long time that this was coming some day and I had already a while ago taken the step of acquiring a refurbished "801g" router.

Yeah, yeah, I know, it is only a phantom upgrade from "b" to "g".  But it is newer hardware.

I suspected that I had to reconfigure the router and since I could not find the installation disk for the old one and since I had a newer one . . .

Well, the old router joins the trash heap.

I knew this was coming some day.

I bypassed the router, connecting the modem directly to the computer, open Firefox, find the website for the router manufacturer.

FAQs?

Pretty soon I was running the disk from the new router hoping against hope that this would lead to an internet connection.

Disk error, failure to install.  Probably because the disk was not compatible with Windows 7.

But I AM A POWER USER.  I knew that the router could be manually configured if I could somehow figure out how to reach it.  Reconnect directly to the computer and then the manufacturer FAQ says to type the IP address into a blank address slot on a browser page.   Reconnect the router, IP address?  It asked for a username and password.

Disconnect everything, reconfigure with the hard connection modem to computer, return to the manufacturer's website.  Find instructions for what to do in default situation, reconnect everything, find the blank spot again, IP address again, enter no user name and default password, and voila, welcome to configuration page.

So enable DHCP, allow cloning of IP address, a couple other tweaks, then one final agony of having to run through a power off power on cycle with all of the parts (unplug router, unplug modem, power down computer, replug modem wait for the lights to stabilize, replug router wait for the lights to stabilize, power up computer) and voila at last.

I have internet and I have wireless.

I AM A POWER USER.