FiOS Outage

You may have noticed that I didn’t write about the history of Thanksgiving yesterday. I meant to; I just couldn’t.

About 5 PM Wednesday as I was frantically trying to finish up a few things at work, my son called from home that he’d gotten a “network cable is unplugged” message while browsing the Internet from the shared Windows XP Home computer in our second-floor hallway. That computer is connected to an ActionTec router by a Cat5 Ethernet cable; the router gets its connectivity from Verizon FiOS and also serves as a Wireless Access Point for all the laptops in the house.

Of course, being 12, he had already tried to “reconnect the cables.” He didn’t know what cables were involved, so he did random things to the power supplies and power strips. He also wanted me to fix the problem over the phone. Right.

When I got home, I took one look at the router lights and decided that the router had probably fried. I wasn’t 100% sure, so I went through the drill: I unplugged the router, cleaned up the way the plugs went into the power strip so that the ActionTec power supply plug couldn’t move the strip’s power switch to the off position, swept up the dust bunnies, unplugged and reconnected all the Cat5 cables, reconnected the power, and reset the router.

None of that helped, so I called FiOS support after dinner. I got a voice-response system that couldn’t really accept much of the information I had, but it eventually got to the point of trying to ping the router and seeing no response. At that point, it put the ticket into a service queue for a live person to deal with.

I got a call from Verizon service as I was sitting down to Thanksgiving dinner on Thursday evening with my extended family. I decided to take the call despite the inconvenient time. The service agent walked me through several of the things I had already tried, and decided to drop-ship me a new router. I then returned to the dinner table.

A few hours later, as we were working on pie, the agent called back: his system wouldn’t accept the drop-ship order. I went back upstairs, and tried bypassing the router under his direction; the computer saw a connection, but couldn’t acquire a valid IP address. A laptop exhibited the same behavior. He mused about the possibility of a bad network port at their end and/or bad network cards in my computers in addition to a bad router, and decided to schedule a service visit; the earliest slot he had open was Saturday morning.

This morning, Verizon called and said that they had a free tech: would we be home all day? We arranged it so that somebody would be; the tech arrived a bit after 11. It didn’t take him long to swap out the router for a new one, and declare the old one “completely fried.” “It happens a lot,” he said. All was well once I edited the new router’s wireless access settings to use WPA and my normal SSID and pass phrase.

I asked the tech why I couldn’t get an IP address when bypassing the old router the day before.  “I dunno,” he said. “It works now.”