When I moved in here, five-ish years ago, I had CenturyLink broadband installed, and got the “lifetime” $75/month deal for 1gig bi-directional… Not bad.
The problem with ISPs and “lifetime” pricing though, is the lifetime only lasts until they sell you to some other company…
So, given this, a little over a year ago CenturyLink spun off “Quantum Fiber” and my $75 / month went to $100 / month, but the service also went to 2gig down, 1 gig up – also not bad.
Last month Quantum was acquired by AT&T…
So far AT&T hasn’t raised the prices or changed the bandwidth, but they sure have been dicking with the NID / router / AP configuration – and this has caused nothing but problems.
See, part of Quantum’s package was they supplied the hardware, and the NID / router / AP has very limited access for the end-user – mostly because people are stupid, like to press buttons, and phone tech support is expensive.
For me this was … fine. As long as it worked I didn’t feel any burning need to take control of things. But now that AT&T is in control and nothing works, it was time to take things into my own hands.
Gaining access, I discovered that some network jockey at AT&T, who probably makes three times what I do, statically addressed the AP as .5, and the DHCP pool as .2 through .254.
(facepalm)
For those not in the know, DCHP is the thingy that hands out addresses on the network, and none of those addresses are permanent (generally), so every time something connects to the network, DHCP gives it an address from its pool of addresses.
In this case the Access Point (AP) was statically addressed to .5, which is inside the pool of DHCP addresses, meaning that occasionally DHCP would give something else on the network .5 and cause WIFI to drop.
I spent about 20 minutes this morning completely reconfiguring the router and access point to sane settings, as well as changing the login for them and disabling remote admin… I’m sure I’ll get a nasty gram from AT&T for locking them out of my hardware, but until then at least everything is working.
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