My house was Without. Internet. Entirely. for fifteen hours last Saturday. It turns out some jackasses in my area have discovered a new sport:
Vandals… Thieves looking to steal copper cable instead cut fiber cables. This has affected fiber service throughout the area. Fiber was cut in three different sections…
Frontier’s initial repair ETA was the following Thursday, maybe. Five days. So that’s how my Saturday went: not doing any of the things I had planned, but instead descending into a full-day “everything in my home depends on Internet connectivity, what on earth do I do to make sure this never happens again” downward spiral.
Here’s the spiral, roughly in order.
1. Buying a UniFi 5G backup
First move, made somewhere in the angry-and-decisive phase of the morning: I bought a UniFi 5G Backup plus a 10GB / 12-month eSIM data pack.
This is probably the right answer for short outages, and I don’t regret it. But 10GB is not a lot of Internet. My next project is figuring out how to configure my UDM Pro to refuse large downloads and video streaming when the 5G backup is the active WAN, because otherwise this is going to get REAL expensive REAL fast the first time somebody in the house decides that a hard-down fiber line is a great moment to re-download a 90GB game.
2. Signing up for a second ISP at the twelve-hour mark
At right around 2pm — the twelve-hour mark — I gave up on waiting, signed up for Spectrum cable Internet, and drove to the local Spectrum store to pick up a modem.
The modem they handed me refuses to auto-negotiate to anything above 100M. It comes up at 100BASE-TX/full-duplex and stays there, no matter what’s on the other end of the cable. And yes, I tried multiple cables.
I then spent at least an hour trying to find a single Spectrum support person who understood what the words “auto-negotiate” mean. I eventually found one! They’re shipping me a replacement modem that may arrive sometime this week.
And then, at the fifteen-hour mark — before I could get the second ISP actually working correctly — Frontier repaired the vandalized fiber and the Internet came back.
I have extremely mixed feelings about this. I was glad to have Internet again, obviously. But I did not, in fact, solve the problem I had spent the entire day trying to solve. I just ran out the clock.
3. Discovering that every redundancy option is bad
In between all of that, I spent hours researching Internet provider redundancy. My conclusion: all the options suck, and all ISPs are horrible and do not care about you even slightly.
- Spectrum: about $30/month for 100M down / 10M up, and that’s the promotional rate — the price goes up after a year. At least thirty dollars a month, forever, for the off chance this happens again.
- Starlink: $55/month for 100M service, which is somehow a worse deal. They do appear to offer a $10/month backup-only tier, but it also appears their current hardware doesn’t support it, so
(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻ - 5G cellular data plans: all expensive, and all bad in their own distinct and creative ways.
There is apparently no product called “reasonably priced insurance against your primary ISP being physically severed.” You either pay full freight for a second connection you’ll use twice a year, or you don’t have one.
4. Many angry words
Also featured on Saturday: a great deal of “sentence enhancers,” and some number of arguments with my darling bride, who kept offering genuinely helpful suggestions such as:
- Just “Let It Go.”
- You know. Like Queen Elsa.
- Next time, wait a full 24 hours before stressing out about it or trying to fix it.
- 100 years ago they didn’t even have Internet connections.
- For the record: pointing out that you would prefer not to return to the Little House on the Prairie days is apparently not the correct response to this suggestion.
- Don’t let things bother you so much.
She’s not wrong. That’s part of what makes it so annoying.
What actually bothered me
I’m not sure there’s a moral to the story here. But the thing that got under my skin wasn’t really losing streaming video and online gaming for a day, irritating as that was.
It was that for fifteen hours I had no idea what the temperature was in my fridge or freezers. I had no home security at all — no cameras, no doorbell, nothing. Every sensor and every camera in this house is, at some level, a thing that phones home. Cut one fiber line three miles away and the whole lot of it goes dark, including the parts that have nothing to do with entertainment and everything to do with whether my food is spoiling or someone is walking around my property.
That’s the part I actually want to fix. The 5G backup helps. It’s not a real answer.
Okay. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.