In addition to making the yard look nicer, the boxes are keeping the pony next door on his side of the fence.

When we moved into the house last April there was no Uverse in the neighborhood. So, that left us with two options for broadband internet: Comcast HSI, and DSL. Having a burning hatred for Comcast I refused to go that route, so we phoned up AT&T and ordered a 1.5/768 DSL package. Everything looked great, a month later we hadn’t been installed and our order had been cancelled three times. I finally got someone to admit that they would never be able to provide DSL service at the address. So, I started investigating other options. Speakeasy came to my rescue. While they weren’t the cheapest option, they weren’t Comcast and they could give me service. I went with them and loved their customer service and their attention to detail.

This is where the fun part of the story begins. A couple of weeks ago we got a flier in the mail complete with trumpeters and everything, Uverse was available in my area! (okay, so there weren’t any trumpeters) My wife and I thought this was a great idea, we’d get to simplify our billing (we already had AT&T for wireless, and we could ditch DirecTV) and make our lives easier. We attempted to order online to get the $200 cash back reward. That is where things started going tits up.

Our order couldn’t be placed online because we had “conflicting service” at the address. So, we phone them up and the conflicting services was our DSL provided on a dry loop by Speakeasy through COVAD. Not be able to operate without the internet put us in a sticky situation. I was given an “advanced sales” number to call the next day during normal business hours. I called the next day and the lovely lady informed me that I had to cancel Speakeasy. She also told me that I could turn around and call back in right away and place my order and as soon as the line lock was released they could get me a 24 hour turn around on install. I was lead to believe that I would be without internet for 3 days or so. It turns out that is not the case and I should not have been told that. Based on what I had been told I went ahead and cancelled Speakeasy, and phoned them backup. This time a gentleman told me I would have to wait for the line lock to release and then I could place my order and that no 24 hour turn around on install existed. I was understandably furious. A week later we finally got the order in, they were able to override the line lock magically on the 6th day of calling. They told me that my line lock had to be off 24 hours prior to install or the order would be cancelled and my install date was 8 days from then. Once again I was enraged. So, I set to work figuring what was going on with the line lock. I posted in the Speakeasy forum over at DSL Reports. A while later I heard back from a representative at Speakeasy that they released the lock 24 hours after I called in, the next day COVAD released the lock to AT&T and that AT&T had been sitting on it for 3 days at that point and didn’t have it scheduled to be completed until another 2 days had gone by. I waited until the morning after the schedule release date and called in to try to get an expedited install and was told that I could only shave a day off of my install. Once again I was more than a bit ticked as this was not what I was lead to believe would happen. I made a post to the AT&T direct forum over at DSL Reports explaining my woes. A representative for the Dallas dispatch center gave me a call 10 minutes later asking me what would be a good time for me over the next couple of days. I told him I was available anytime if they gave me a 30 minute heads-up. He said he’d get back with me in half an hour or so while he pulled the schedule but indicated he would be able to get me in within the next 48 hours. He called back about an hour later with news that he was able to work me in the next day for a “late morning/early afternoon” install. I was out mowing the lawn at 8:45 when “late morning” rolled around and the tech showed up. I had pre-wired a CAT3 pull from the NID directly to my desk (back when I had Speakeasy) and 2 CAT5e pulls from my desk to where I wanted the STB and an eventual media center PC. It took him about 45 minutes to locate the equipment box about 4 blocks away (instead of being in the ROW, it was in somebody’s yard obstructed from view). He got back to the house at about 9:30 and was out of there by 10:00 AM. All in all it was a painless install once it got scheduled.

The TV service worked great when he left. I noticed that I had a fast internet connection (getting just under the advertised 3Mbps) but that latency in starting to load webpages was horrendous on my Mac. The problem didn’t seem to go away when I used Firefox instead of Safari. However, things were zippy on my iPhone and on work laptops (Dells with WinXP). I chalked it up as something annoying, but that I’d figure it out later and headed into the office. So, I was left with three tasks. Configure my AirPort Extreme base station to work with the AT&T RG, and solve my problems with the Mac. Here is how I addressed each of those.

AirPort Extreme Configuration

I first disconnected my computer’s ethernet connection and connected to the AirPort via wifi and launched the AirPort Utility app. I clicked on my AirPort and clicked the “Manual Setup” button at the bottom. I clicked the “Internet” icon at the top of the window to bring up the Internet settings panel. At the bottom of that panel I set “Connection Sharing” to “Off (Bridge Mode)”  and pressed the “Update” button. I then connected my AirPort extreme to the RG through the WAN port and connected my iMac back to the ethernet. Viola! Everything worked.

Slow Browsing on The iMac

I was having some difficulty with the iMac taking forever to load web pages. I noticed that pages that had a lot of images (and thus required a lot of HTTP requests) took longer than a simple text only page. This led me to believe I had a problem getting to the DNS servers. I was able to ping them just fine. I was left scratching my head. I then opened up System Preferences and went to the Network Preferences. For some reason my iMac had the old IP address of the airport base station specified as the first DNS server and then to fall back to the RG as the secondary. As soon as I cleared that out and pressed “Apply” things got zippy on the Mac. Apparently every DNS request was looking for a server at 10.0.0.1, and once that timed out falling back to 192.168.1.254 (the RG). I don’t know if that manually entered IP address for DNS was my fault or something the AirPort did when I first set it up. Either way it is all back in working order again!