More digging!

So the CenturyLink tech arrived.  Bottom line:  we need to sit tight for probably another week.

Evidently, pair-bonded service, what one needs to get speeds like 12M, needs two cable pairs. And we currently only have one available.  Yes, there are two from the curb to the house, but

1. one is currently in use by the landline+Megapath, and I'm thinking it would be a Rather Bad Idea to chop that up before we have the new stuff actually working (can't even get the new IP numbers until the new service is established, hence can't program the new firewall yet, etc),
2. being 1971-vintage wire, the twisted pairs are really not all that twisty, and for the higher speeds this starts to matter, never mind that it's already been spliced once (thank you gas company) and the junction once it gets to the house has certain spaghetti aspects to it (some of this being left-over bullshit from 10 years ago when they were first setting up the line for Speakeasy, so it's probably never going to perform to full capacity anyway

and, it seems, CenturyLink is quite happy to install a new, modern cable with 6+ pairs, free of charge.

Me: "So, this is an intelligence test?"

Except they can't do that today. He has to place a dig order for this. Which means some time in the next week a digging company is going to show up with the mole thingie to run yet another tunnel under my lawn (after they have first carefully mapped out where all of the Other Stuff is).

I think it will be absolutely hilarious if they manage to slice our new gas line.

CenturyLink order placed

After much waffling, I decided to go with CenturyLink on the theory that they will be less evil than Comcast.  The order has been placed.  It'll be a business grade line 12M/2M; fibre to the curb; VDSL2 to the house.  Only took 14 years to get the upgrade from 1.5M/784K.  Yay.

I'm guessing the massive speed increase won't affect LambdaMOO much except in that you'll be less impacted when William decides to download yet another Roblox thingie.

Technician is arriving Tuesday (9/30) to install.  Assuming everything works and the subsequent ordering of static-IPs turns out to be as painless as claimed, then, sometime in the next day or so when those are activated and I have the reconfigured firewall ready to go, we'll switch things over, which will hopefully be a brief interruption in service as your DNS entries expire -- all new IPs for everything.

Wheee...

IP changes coming - probably new ISP as well

It seems that Somebody has decided to eliminate the legacy Speakeasy circuit that our Internet connection currently runs on. It's not entirely clear who.

Guy on the phone from Megapath, who was apparently confused about who actually provides my local phone service, referring to "Qwest", a company that has not existed for a number of years now, seems to think it was the phone company's decision, except I wouldn't have thought the regs would allow this (though I may be behind on just how much the regs concerning ILECs and ISPs have been corrupted by now). Letter from Megapath suggests that this was an internal Megapath decision, i.e., they're just tired of maintaining it, in which case, with that plus dealing with the Mumbai call centers, the layoffs of Speakeasy-knowledgeable people, and other shit that has happened since the Speakeasy buyout, plus the lingering resentment over the crap that Covad pulled 10 years ago (now that Megapath also owns Covad), I think I might finally be tired of being their customer -- I suppose it's a measure of how wonderful Speakeasy was to deal with that I gave them the benefit of the doubt and held out this long.

Still exploring options. CenturyLink is offering a 12M/2M fibre-optic connection for about 1/2 what I'm paying now. The one annoying thing is it has to be a business line for me to get the static IPs (which then means they can't bundle it with the residential phone service the way they're doing now, and for some reason business phone service is insanely expensive). On the other hand the business call-center people seem to be far more clueful -- having the residential call-center person asking me what an IP is wasn't inspiring lots of confidence.

The one thing I know for certain is that sometime in the next few weeks, my service needs to change to Something New. The one noticeable thing on your end will be all-new IP addresses for everything. Which, in theory, should be able to happen mostly seamlessly, but we'll see how that goes.

Gas line work done.

So... PSE has connected up the new gas line, switched it over, relit the water heater, phone line has been repaired and switched back, the various holes in our cul-de-sac are filled in an patched (in theory, we're due for a street repaving soon; we'll see how that goes). There is one remaining hole in the lawn and the guy I talked to was not entirely clear why it was still open, but it's not near anything that matters (i.e., apart from the gas line; it was a place where the mole/digger-thingie needed to change direction), knock wood.

And now I get a call from Megapath that CenturyLink is apparently eliminating the legacy Speakeasy circuits and some More Stuff needs to happen.

Surviving so far on temporary phone line

Realizing that I should have split the last post since the current state of the world is that the DSL line is up and LambdaMOO is accessible, the only remaining problem being that it's this weird-ass temporary phone line strung off of our neighbor's house and at some point the real phone line needs to be fixed, at which point there will be a (hopefully brief) interruption to switch the phone service back.

This morning the gas guys were back at work. Apparently they did try to call in the break but they thought it was a cable-TV line and so weren't getting much luck with the cable company. Turns out if we'd had the wherewithal to notice that the plate covering the hole where they were digging in the lawn was in fact a wooden panel rather than a steel plate like they were using out in the road, we'd have been able to lift it out of the way on Saturday and the phone tech could have fixed it then, because the break was right there. Oh well. Anyway, the ball's in their court now.

As of this afternoon there's now a second hole in the lawn a few feet away. Meaning they found the water main and managed not to break it (thus far).