Ranting Kenya

Don’t let the title fool you, this isn’t a list. I’m just going to tell the story of my latest Telus internet experience. I post this not to speak poorly of one provider or another, but merely to report my most recent experience. I would also like to say that Telus has provided me the product I originally ordered without fail for nearly 3 years now. Also, writing this will help me remember all the events for when I call Telus to cancel my connection.

My debacle started back on January 19. I noticed on the Telus website that I was paying the price for their top speed DSL connection (6Mbps down, 1Mbps up), but receiving a connecting so inferior they didn’t even offer it any more (1.5Mpbs down, 256Kpbs up). So I called Telus to ask for their top service. I was fine paying what I was paying, I just wanted more speed. Nice of them to just upgrade my service for me. The CSR on the line was very helpful, everything was going great. They asked me if I wanted one of their new gateways to replace my modem and router. I asked if it was needed for the need speeds, he said no, so I said I’d keep what I have since it works exactly the way I want. At any rate, expect my service to be up to full speed in 24 hours.

Later that evening my internet connection went down completely. All the lights on my modem were still on (as in functioning correctly), so I assumed that they were flipping the switch. I was pretty happy with how things started to move so quickly, and I went to bed excited to try the new speed the next day.

I wake the next morning to no internet. That’s ok I suppose, the guy on the phone did in fact say 24 hours. So I went to work, and then I came home to no internet. Now I’ve decided to call tech support. As I’m dialing, I decided to do what I do for everybody when troubleshooting net connection, I power cycled the whole deal. Modem, router, and computer. Before I can get to an agent to troubleshoot, my whole system is back up as it was before to no net connection.

So I start working with the tech support guy. I hear all the usual stuff repeatedly. “Unplug the modem for a few seconds”, “Now unplug the router”, “Plug the computer directly into the modem.” Of course I do all of these things with no avail. Now I get put on hold while he contacts some other support someone. He comes back, we do all the same things again, plus add renew the IP on the computer etc. No internet. I get put on hold again. This time however, the agent spoke to someone who did something, now I have internet. Excellent.

So I do a speed test at speedtest.net. I’m on their 3Mpbs down service, not the full 6. I mention this to the tech, he’s says he doesn’t see their top service on my account, so I should call the CSRs again to re-order. Ok fine. So I do that. Everything should be ok. Later that night, my internet goes down again.

Now repeat the story with tech support again the next day, which is now Wednesday. This time however, I don’t have to re-order the high speed, they’re going to send a technician out to me on Friday. What time? They don’t set times, it’s an “all-day appointment”. How convenient. Then I remember since I’m in a townhouse that they generally do work at some common box for the whole set of units, so they probably won’t even need access to my house.

Anyway, I take the appointment and the day off. The guy comes by, and the internet it back. Not at the speed I ordered. He says to me he say that I ordered it and it should be in on monday. So I wait. By tuesday, still not the speed I ordered. So I call again, they say they didn’t see the top service on my account, so I re-order again. And again that evening the internet goes down.

So, a couple more phone calls to tech support, same issues, and in the end they want to send a tech guy to my house again. So I hold out for 3 or 4 days with no internet for the tech guy. I explained when I made this appointment that an “all-day” appointment is unacceptable. They agree to send the guy to me after 4pm. So I race home, get there at 4 to find a note on my door saying that he’s did something but was unable to get into the house to check the modem so upload may not work properly. I also says he was there at 2:50pm in the afternoon.

So I check my connection, I’m not getting my full down speed (just over half actually), and now I have the worst upload ever in my life (roughly 100 Kbps). So then I called Shaw to get cable internet.

So the cable guy was supposed to come to my house between 1 and 3pm. He was there early. He had everything he needed. We didn’t power cycle everything a million times. He brought the modem, signal amplifier, cables, splitter, everything and did all the work in probably 30 mins. Now I’m receiving service that faster than anything Telus even provides, and I’m pretty much hitting the advertised marks (they advertise 10 down 1 up and I’m getting like 98% of those numbers). He also informs me that in a couple months Shaw will be moving to Docsis 3 and I’ll be in for a nice surprise.

I would also like to note that he didn’t try to give me some stupid gateway, he just plugged the modem into my router. I’ve put DD-WRT on my router, and it has all sorts of crazy setting so that 2 XBox 360s, 5 computers all work correctly for streaming and Windows Media Center. He never even said the word router, he just plugged everything in. That’s exactly what he should do. Get a working connection to my house, let me handle what I do with it afterwards.

I haven’t cancelled Telus yet, I’ll be doing that later today. Perhaps that will be a seperate post.

Now that my new computer has arrived, I’ve had a chance to play around with Windows Media Center included with Windows Home Premium. I have clicked around Media Center before, so I had some idea of what to expect. I would also like to preface this by saying I haven’t used a TiVo before.

Media Center immediately makes me mad angry at my cable provider. I can’t get the digital channels, and obviously that includes the HD channels. That is a huge let down, because this product is excellent. It has features for every possible contingency. The guide is snappy, the interface is efficient and good looking, the program loads quickly, it’s generally very good all-around.

One thing I’ve noticed, is that the PVR functions are working without any hitches. On my Motorola 6416 PVR, which works just good enough that I don’t run it over in my car, pausing usually skips a couple frames, same for pressing play afterwards, sometimes the sound goes down, or the picture goes wonky. None of that happens in Media Center. It’s very polished by comparison.

Sports

As a sports fan, I suppose I could complain since there’s not dual tuners for PIP or using two channel buffers. However, this is pretty much as good as it gets with only one tuner. In the sports section, you get to watch a sporting event in a “windowed” screen. But, around the reduced size video, is a ticker of the other sports games across the top. So you may be watching the Calgary Flames game, but you’ll have the instant updates for other NHL games, the NBA games, MLB, NFL, Tennis, Golf, whatever is on. If you click on one, you go to that channel to watch the game.

Also, accross the bottom, there’s a news ticker. It’ll scroll news that you’d see on Fox’s sports website. You can scroll down and click on it, and it’ll take you to the article within the Media Center interface. This is excellent since it doesn’t launch a browser so you can read it all from your couch using just the regular remote control.

Along with news stories that appear on the bottom, it’ll also have game highlight updates from other channels. Things like “Sidney Crosby Scores”. When you click on that, it takes you to the appropriate channel. If you’re paying attention, you’ll be on that channel before the televised replay. It’s an excellent feature.

Searching

My Motorola box also has searching, but it’s really an exercise in patience to use it. In Media Center, searching is easy. The numbers on your remote work like the numbers on a phone. Each number has about 3 letters. As you type, you get real-time results. So you can just type until you see the show you want, saving you the most amount of time possible. Excellent.

Searching allows you to look for shows and movies by a number of categories. Title, keyword, genre, actor, director. What’s neat is say you search for “Sean Connery”, not only to you get the movies he’s been in that are playing in the next 2 weeks, you get all the movies he’s ever been in. You’ll see all the cover art for all the movie boxes, which is much nicer than scrolling through a list of text. Now, seeing all the movies at once doesn’t sound very useful. Who cares if he was in “Dr. No” if it’s not going to be on. Well, Media Center allows you to mark shows that aren’t necessarily on in the next two week to record eventually when they are on. I believe this is a stupendous feature. I could program Media Center to record the world movie premiere of whatever movie when it eventually comes out. I don’t have to think about it.

Online Content

Now I haven’t clicked on all my options here yet, but I did find some excellent features. For instance, you can find other related videos to certain content on the web. So, in my case, I was able to find some post-game sports interviews to watch. They stream right off the web. Awesome.

Media Center Extender

I have an Xbox 360, which I’ve finally been able to use as a Media Center Extender. I didn’t know exactly what it was going to be like, especially since I’m running my 360 wirelessly now. If you look at the network connection on my Xbox, the wireless signal is only 3 out of 4 bars.

This, however, was enough for me to stream HD content (on an 802.11g wireless network) to my Xbox with no frame rate issues whatsoever. It was actually quite exciting that it worked so well.

You can stream live tv, recorded shows, pictures, and music to your extender. There are really only two limitations to this interface. You cannot stream DivX videos with the media center interface. You can play DivX videos on the actual computer in media center, or through the Xbox (but not in the media center extender mode).

The other limitation is that you can’t stream a movie from a DVD in your media center computer to your Media Center Extender. But the Xbox 360 has a DVD drive already, why would I care about this? Well, I was hoping that would work because then I’d go buy a Blu-Ray drive for the computer and I’d have Blu-Ray movies on my big screen. Unfortunately, I was not that lucky. So close!

In Conclusion

I’ve really only had my computer hooked up to the analog cable for a day now, and I’m already really impressed. I’m wishing I had another Media Center computer to hook up to my cable box and then eliminate the need to use the cable-box’s software. I’m also wishing that Canada would go cable card or something similar so that I could get my HD directly into my computer. It’s when I see the potential of things like this that I wish I lived in the US.

All in all, I’m going to be looking forward to getting a flatscreen TV and a comfortable couch/chair in my computer room.