Thursday, September 22, 2011

Now getting internet at home.

I must apologize for the long silence. My last post was in May of this year. I have been busy establishing my residence in the Garfield Park neighborhood. I initially had no internet service at home and was having to go the public library for free WiFi. I expect to be more productive now that I have my own internet service--Verizon mobile hotspot. It's like your own personal WiFi--they call it MiFi. It's wireless, picks up a 4g signal, and sends it on to up to five devices. They're having some trouble with it and I am working with them to bring their solution to my device. It's a reliability issue. The device reverts to 3g at times and the issue is apparently in these transitions. It is supposed to be able to get 3g when 4g isn't available, but there is some problem and the result is that the connection is unreliable. I'm having to spend a lot of time with a large download because the connection stops and I have to recommence the download manually too often. If it would remain connected the download would only take an hour or so, maybe less. Instead, it's taking over a week. We'll see if Verizon and I can fix it. It's not just me, but I have the additional problem that I don't have Windows or Mac and the firmware update that fixes the problem works only with those two, not my Linux OS. They have promised to get me a new device with the firmware update installed, hopefully in a couple weeks or so. All their technicians are doing their best to get me straightened out. At this point, though I did lose my temper once, I have to admit, I am a happy customer--compared to no service it's great to have some service. Fortunately, I pay a flat fee for 5 GB of transmissions so that the amount of hours I spend getting the 5 GB doesn't matter. I'm mostly concerned about getting my 5 GB, not how long it takes to get them, at least for now. I am hoping that the problem gets fixed and that the difference will be striking.

No endorsement for now, though.