Big Companies That Just Dont Give A Rats A**.

[chuckbradley]

I hate that I cant get cable and it runs in front of my house, I am 1000feet off the road and offered to pay for a trunk extension but they wont even talk to me. The people that matter are shielded by idiots and you cant get arounf them.

I hate that I cant get DSL, my neighbor has it but the box I am served from doesnt have the node needed.

I have , or had Satellite but it went dead last night. After 2 hours on the phone they say I need a tech to come test the hardware. Direcway, or hughes.net now, tells me a tech will contact me in 3-5 days to make an appointment. No telling how long it will take. I hate that i cant get somebody to come out and look and this thing. Of course I am out of warranty and will have to pay for whatever is wrong.

I hate dial up, and paying for it while I am still paying for satellite that doesnt work.

I also hate talking to people in india that you cant understand and each one follows a script and makes you do things over and over again you already know wont work but they cant stray from the script or they are completely lost.

Now i go out to play with my dish to see if something is loose so I can come back and write how I hate getting my ass fried when I am doing something I shouldnt even be doing and know nothing about.

Anybody have any suggestions?

[EricW]

Unplug your dish/router/whatever it's called from the wall and let them sit for 5 minutes so that the power supplies completely discharge. Plug them back in again and see what happens. Note that I said "unplug." The on/off switch often doesn't de-energize the equipment.

What this will do is reset everything (hopefully). This kind of equipment occasionally goes stupid when it loses signal and usually takes a hard-reset to make it talk again.

Barring that, check your outside coax connections. Frequently, the connections the installers use are not watertight. I've seen one where the entire copper conductor of the coax disintegrated at a junction due to corrosion.

After that, the next thing to check is dish alignment. Don't change anything, but do check for loose mounting, or for warping of whatever surface the dish is mounted to.

After that, I'm clueless...

[chuckbradley]

Thanks Eric. Did all the things they said to do. They say my dish needs to be repointed. Its solid with no movement. I suspect the coax cable ends as you said or a bad LNB which is susceptable to lightning whihc we had a lot of yesterday morning. It worked all day though. I did call around and get a hold of a small company and have a tech coming to check it out tommorrow morning. Its the same people who come when Direcway puts a work order through in 3-5 days.

I have my fingers crossed. Dial up sucks.

Now I cant get Outlook express to send emails through MSN dialup. I can get them, just wont send.

[EricW]

Sounds like something is fried. Whoever is coming to fix your dish, tell them to put in in-line surge suppressor on the coax. If you're in lightning country, you need one on the power supply side too. Buy quality. Don't get a $5.99 one that uses MOV's. They only work for a while. The MOV's degrade with time and then you're right back to having nothing again.

Your power may have not been taken out, but someone on your utility probably did, and it can send a spike through the system when it gets put back on line - which may be why your outage doesn't seem to correspond with the storm activity.

The other thing that can happen with electrical utilities is that they switch capacitor banks in and out depending on the loading level. They don't do anything to make that switch gentle. It's just BAM! On BAM! OFF and what happens happens. Generally this coincides with start and end of peak levels of industrial activity. If you have an industrial area on your feeder, this is another possibility.

Edited April 20, 2006 by EricW

[lowlands]

How far away is the neighbours home and how good a friend is he?

I'd say it's an option to either share the DSL with the neighbour or get a second landline and DSL installed at his place and hook it up to your house with some wireless ethernet gear. Having to cope with satellite hookups when "real" Internet is so close just sounds kinda wrong.

[chuckbradley]

Tell me about it. They are about 1000 feet away. Dont know if they would go for all the equipment installed in their house for me.

Been working on the email issue. Come to find out many ISP's are blocking port 25 so you cant send email without going through them. I am sure many of you know more about this than me. I found a fix but it isnt working. It seems smtp.email.msn.com isnt recognizing my msn password.

So if your waiting on an email form me, maybe tomorrow if the satellite gets fixed.

[bberkley]

Chuck,

See if the telco will send someone out to your place to evaulate for ISDN. Since that's really old school broadband, the guys that know it also know alot more than your general telephone company idjit. Get him to look at the pedestal you are served from, and he'll know the skinny on why you can't get DSL, and can usually get the ball rolling for you to get that issue taken care of. I know from experience that it can be done, just got to find the right telco guy.

If you can receive mail, its usually got the right password, you might have something else fubar'ed in your email settings. Are you getting email from MSN, or somewhere else, and are trying to use MSN smtp as outgoing? If your pop3 server is not MSN, you should be using the same outgoing SMTP as your incoming. Its rare that companies run POP3 on one box, and SMTP on another, but not being familiar with MSN, I don't know.

As far as the cable company, instead of calling their installer, find a person in the corporate office and write them a letter, with a copy going to your local paper's OpEd page. Cable is fighting satellite for customers, and I can't imagine them not getting you taken care of if you've offered to take care of the last-mile connection stuff.

I know your pain, I was jonesin' for broadband during my short hospital stay this week, I could see the wireless node with my laptop, but since I couldn't really get out of bed that easily, I didn't bother to check for an ethernet port near my phone cord. Which I discovered when I was supervising the gathering of my stuff when I was discharged.

[Rob Boudrie]

Tell me about it. They are about 1000 feet away. Dont know if they would go for all the equipment installed in their house for me.

Been working on the email issue. Come to find out many ISP's are blocking port 25 so you cant send email without going through them. I am sure many of you know more about this than me. I found a fix but it isnt working. It seems smtp.email.msn.com isnt recognizing my msn password.

So if your waiting on an email form me, maybe tomorrow if the satellite gets fixed.

Chuck -

You need to find an web hosting company that will offer SMTP email on a port other than 25 (2525 is commonly used). Most email programs provide an option for specification of the port (It's under the "ADVANCED" tab when configuring an account in Outlook Express).

Port 25 blocking is sufficiently common that many ISP's already offer SMTP service on an alternate port. I suggest you contact the ISP hosting www.shooters.connection.com (email support@tristarnet.com) to see if this is the case.

Alternatively, you can sign up for an independent SMTP service which exists to serve users with port 25 blockes. http://www.tzo.com/MainPageServices/Produc...ies/13_OMR.html is one service which offers Port 2525 SMTP to $49.95/year (up to 2,000 emails/month, higher prices for greater volume). They require a client on your PC to keep their servers updated with your dynamic IP address, since they use the IP address to authenticate that you are allowed to send email through their relay.

[chuckbradley]

Tell me about it. They are about 1000 feet away. Dont know if they would go for all the equipment installed in their house for me.

Been working on the email issue. Come to find out many ISP's are blocking port 25 so you cant send email without going through them. I am sure many of you know more about this than me. I found a fix but it isnt working. It seems smtp.email.msn.com isnt recognizing my msn password.

So if your waiting on an email form me, maybe tomorrow if the satellite gets fixed.

Chuck -

You need to find an web hosting company that will offer SMTP email on a port other than 25 (2525 is commonly used). Most email programs provide an option for specification of the port (It's under the "ADVANCED" tab when configuring an account in Outlook Express).

Port 25 blocking is sufficiently common that many ISP's already offer SMTP service on an alternate port. I suggest you contact the ISP hosting www.shooters.connection.com (email support@tristarnet.com) to see if this is the case.

Alternatively, you can sign up for an independent SMTP service which exists to serve users with port 25 blockes. http://www.tzo.com/MainPageServices/Produc...ies/13_OMR.html is one service which offers Port 2525 SMTP to $49.95/year (up to 2,000 emails/month, higher prices for greater volume). They require a client on your PC to keep their servers updated with your dynamic IP address, since they use the IP address to authenticate that you are allowed to send email through their relay.

Rob, thanks for trying to help. I had to sign up with MSN to get on the internet. They block port 25. i am trying to find a way around it but the only thing I can find is to change the server name to MSN's and use my MSN member name and password for authentication. I id that and it did try to send the email but for some reason when it askes for the password and name it doesnt recognize it. I spent 2 hours last night trying to figure out why. I changed passwords, tried both name and name@msn.com. Nothing works. I get the obx that says enter name & password and even though its the rigth one the box comes back up with enter name & password.

I switched it all back and tried the 2525 port but that fialed also. MSN wnats you to use their email program. If there is a port they allow I cant find it. Hopefully i can get the satellite fixed and back up with the satellit ISP.

I did talk to the DSL tech for the area. He said all they had to do was put a node in my box. The node costs 9000.00 and the amount of customers has to justify it. Sad thing is the box is on my property. I sold them an easement to put it there. This was 8-9 year ago before DSL was known about or I would have made them agree to provide the dsl service as part of the deal.

On the cable, I did send an email to every email address I could find for adelphia. No repsonse. Another example of not giving a rats ass. The only communication I had with them was through the local clerk. She told me what the engineer said. I asked for his number. She wouldnt give it to me. I asked that he call me. He never did.

Can you feel my frustration?

On the bright side I have outgrown my current location and will have to move soon. You can bet internet will be a big factor in my decision where to locate.

Edited April 21, 2006 by chuckbradley

[Rob Boudrie]

I switched it all back and tried the 2525 port but that fialed also. MSN wnats you to use their email program. If there is a port they allow I cant find it. Hopefully i can get the satellite fixed and back up with the satellit ISP.

tor in my decision where to locate.

You need to:

(1) Use Outlook Express or similar program, not whatever MSN gives you

(2) Connect to a server on a port other than 25. This will probably not be your ISP, but another mail server.

In simple terms, if you can find an unblocked port 2525 (for www.tzo.com), or any other unblocked port an provider will support, this solution will work. AT thsi point, you will just be using your local ISP as the connection to the network, not the provider of email sending services.

[chuckbradley]

Well good news. I found a local tech that installs these things. Did that by just calling directv ads in the phone book and asked if they did direcway internet. He came out and found a fried cable end, repaired it and only charged 60.00. He drove a good 40 miles to get here. I wrote all his numbers down just in case.

[geezer-lock]

Well good news. I found a local tech that installs these things. Did that by just calling directv ads in the phone book and asked if they did direcway internet. He came out and found a fried cable end, repaired it and only charged 60.00. He drove a good 40 miles to get here. I wrote all his numbers down just in case.

Dayam, talk about a low-tech solution. A phone book!

Gota remember that one.

David C