This Modern Age

[bobquasit]

Our internet service is from Comcast Xfinity. And the WiFi has been absolutely terrible. Constant freeze-ups, slow-downs, and sudden shifting to low resolution images. It happens on Netflix, Hulu, and YouTube, and it's almost all the time. Every time I called Comcast about it, they'd reset the signal. That helped for a day at most, and then we were back to the same shitty service.

So I went to the store. The clerk recommended I buy a router to replace the Xfinity one. It was pricey, but I figured it would be worth it. We stream a lot. In fact, we hardly ever watch broadcast TV. The only reason we get TV from Comcast at all is because they'd charge us more for just internet.

But our WiFi remained terrible.

This didn't make sense to me. My place isn't that big. Comcast had refused to give us a second wired connection to the TV, but the router was still less than 20 feet away from the TV - albeit one floor up. No matter how I aimed the router's antennae, the WiFi signal never stayed good for long.

So I went back to the store. The clerk recommended a range extender. It was pricey, but I had bought a large-screen TV a few months ago and I'm already paying for Netflix, Hulu, and YouTube Red; I figured it would be worth it.

Still our WiFi remained terrible. I tried moving the range-extender around, But no matter where I put it, our signal was totally unreliable. Drops, long pauses, low resolution...all the time.

Maybe you know how utterly frustrating it is when you're really into a show, and suddenly it freezes and that damned "loading" circle appears - only to be replaced after a few minutes with "Signal lost, check your internet connection". I grew up in the age of broadcast TV and rabbit ears, and I swear that our signal was much more reliable back then. And it was free!

So I went back to the store. The clerk suggested I set up a mesh network; he said that would fix the problem for sure. But it was pricey. Too pricey. It was $500, and I just didn't have that kind of money to blow on TV any more. So I bought a fifty-foot ethernet cable for $14.99. We went home, plugged one end into the router, ran the cable down the stairs and plugged the other end into the TV.

I've never seen such a crystal-clear picture. And not a single pause in the last two days!

Comments

[donnad]

We discovered our xfinity internet/wireless doing the same thing, even with the computer right next to router it would still be terrible. The modem/router would drop out randomly and need to be reset multiple times a day. So we ended up putting the router and modem (is it still called a modem?) on a UPS, plugged into the wall. All the drop out problems cleared up. It seems our problems were because of the electrical grid fluctuations. They aren't always obvious visually, but the electronics picked them up and it slowed everything down or crashed the modem/router. Now they have a continuous electrical flow even if the power browns out or goes off completely.