Internet down

The Internet service provider that serves my apartment complex was bought up by a bigger service provider. The old employees who knew everything about the installation were laid off. So today I got to talk to the new employees.

I described the mess that is the wiring cabinet at the back of my coat closet, which has six CAT5 bundles all terminating at a punch block, some of which are then punched through to RJ-45 to plug into a hub, which, get this, is powered by one of the twisted pairs from the punch block which is also shared with the telephone jacks as well as the Internet jacks in my apartment. The technician at the other end is aghast. "I've never heard of anything so depraved!".

I describe the experiments I tried -- providing 7.5v to the hub from my own power supply (the hub worked then), plugging the wire from the router into my own hub to see whether anything is getting there from the wiring closet downstairs, etc. -- and he finally says "we're going to have to send a technician there to see what happened in that wiring closet."

Note that my apartment building isn't down. I can hook up to my upstairs neighbor's wireless access point and surf the net over this same service provider. Just mine is down. Apparently a telephone guy got into the wiring cabinet and said "Huh, what are these pairs doing punched down over *here*?!" and punched them down somewhere else, thinking my pairs were telephone pairs rather than Internet pairs. GAH!

So anyhow, that's why posting has been light over the past couple of days (well, the fact that I didn't get in until 2am yesterday might be an excuse too :-).

-- Badtux the Internet-less Penguin