Subtle Problems With Broadband Wireless Internet - December 7th 2006

INTERNET CONNECTION WOES

Because we’re out in the sticks, we used to have to use a satellite internet connection using Xplornet to get ourselves connected. Whilst not particularly fast, it was pretty reliable. Main causes of downtime were storms in the Washington DC area where the ground station was and occasionally when it was snowing particularly hard here.

Then Da Vinci Broadband, a new wireless internet service provider started up in the area. The possibly apocryphal story is that the company owner lives near here and wanted a decent internet connection so started up his own company to get it! Da Vinci is much faster, cheaper and generally more reliable than the satellite connection so does anyone want a satellite dish and modems?

There have been a few problems with Da Vinci as the service is pretty new and the managers and technical staff are learning as they go. But they are tenacious in sorting out these problems and are very keen on their customer service. As one of the bigger users on the network, we tend to know immediately when something goes wrong and I now have the owners’ cell phone number to report any problems if I don’t get a good response from the support hotline.

In the early days there were a series of strange incidents when the service would go down for about a minute, come back for about three minutes and then go down again. This was eventually traced to a couple of users who had their internet connection plugged into the wrong port on their routers. Instead of using the socket clearly marked “internet” they had it plugged into one of the local area connection sockets. This meant that every few minutes when they were connected, their routers tried to reset the IP address of the internet connection to a local IP causing the service to have to drop everyone and reinitialize. Since that was sorted, the problem hasn’t recurred, which means everyone’s learning from this kind of incident.

More recently, the service speed has deteriorated a little and this morning I received an e-mail from Da Vinci explaining that they had finally figured out why and what they were doing to fix it. It turns out that the problems are caused by the Rockyview hospital!

The hospital is in the direct line between Da Vinci’s downtown location in Calgary and the Bragg Creek tower. Over the summer, the hospital added four floors to the top of their building which meant that the signal between the Bragg tower and downtown was degraded by having to pass through that building instead of over it. The problem wasn’t noticed when the new structure was just a steel framework, but now that it’s being filled in, the signal’s been getting worse. The solution is of course much simpler than the process of figuring out what was happening. A simple realignment of the signal so it goes round the building instead of through it. This work should be completed within the next couple of weeks and the result will be even better performance. WooHoo.

As buildings in Calgary continue to get taller and more densely packed to satisfy corporate demand for office space, this problem may well recur. At least now, Da Vinci will be aware of the possible cause of the problem and next time should be able to react before service is degraded.