Just when I thought I'd seen everything.... We have a customer who lives in a converted missile silo that has been using our services for a few months. He's an engineer and has been a real pain in the butt at times when he thinks there is a problem with his connection. He has no cable, no satellite and no landline or cell phone service, so he pretty much lives on his $39.95/month Internet connection and MagicJack VOIP phone - while constantly downloading video streams. Unfortunately, I had worked with him on another project and has my cell phone number so he continually calls me at all times if his connection speed drops below what he thinks it should be at. Before, he was calling our after-hours tech support line continuously until I told him that he would be charged for the calls if he kept doing it. We did identify a backhaul problem at one point, but the rest of the issues have been localized interference at his location, as no other customers seem to be affected by it.
Anyway - he calls yesterday on his VOIP phone to tell me that he has Internet problems. I login to the AP and see that his quality is terrible (although everyone else on the AP is fine) so I try to tell him that I'll change the channel. I change the channel and things clean up, then I logged into his radio to make sure the settings were okay, then rebooted it. The radio did not come back. So I sent a message to my staff: "I believe a power cycle will get him back on , but I can’t call him because he uses that Magic Jack phone. Anyway, in the event that he reactivates a cold war missile silo signaling system and gets in touch with tech support, a power cycle should get him back online." This afternoon, I get a call from a local number, and it is an old man who is saying something about Matt Larsen calling on the radio having problems with his Internet. After about five minutes of slow, patient questions, I finally determine that he is a Ham Radio operator and has been getting calls from a guy in Kimball wanting to know what is wrong with the Internet down there. So, in effect, mr. missile silo reactivated a cold war signaling system (Ham Radio) and I got the message back to him that he needs to power cycle. Unfortunately, a power cycle didn't fix the problem, so now I am going across town to the radio operator's house to see if I can provide reconfigure his CPE over ham radio. This should be interesting. Matt Larsen vistabeam.com -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
