Today’s post is definitely a rant on my part.  Tune-in, tune- out it’s your choice.

On Friday I suffered a network issue on my home network.  This is not a simple home network but a complex set of multiple routers, switches, network attached storage, wireless access points (multiple) with multi-bands, port hardening on servers, complex firewall rules and more.  (This is just a hobby, nothing commercial here and my monthly band width usage is pretty low.)

So trouble shooting is never easy.  Couple this with the fact I needed to be out of town a couple of days and my trouble extended up until today.

What’s the Rant?

My rant starts with Murphy’s law.  The breakdown in my network occurred when I had the least available time to attend to it – thanks Murphy.

Next, come my friends at Shaw, although I cannot really rant about them in this case, as it’s how I reacted that stretched the problem across 4 days, not really their fault.

That being said, to be fair to myself, a past experience with Shaw internet support influenced my decisions.

About 6 months ago my internet speed dropped to almost  too low to measure (let’s say less than one Mbps).  I pay for 50 Mbps so I called Shaw and spent about 2 hours trouble shooting – which I knew was a waste of time because the issue was at their end.

They booked an appointment for 5 days in the future to come and investigate on site.  The day of the appointment they called and advised they had found an infrastructure issue and so did not need to come out and our speed would be restored in two days.  It was fixed as they said, but the whole experience left me lacking confidence in Shaw support (I should note, during the course of the troubleshooting it was pretty apparent I knew more about the networking than the Shaw technician).

So this time, although I suspected a possible issue with the Shaw provided modem router I did not call them until I had fully investigated all my component “moving parts”.

In the end, the issue turned out to be impossible for me to uncover.  About 4 years ago I created a pass through from the Shaw router to my own (my own router had a plethora of rules that I did not wish to copy to the Shaw router).   And this worked fine till now.  When I called Shaw,  the technician advised I should get them to access my router/modem directly and configure a bypass (whereby the router function of their modem was disabled).

You might be able to imagine my surprise (or not) that something working fine for 4 years would suddenly stop working for no apparent reason.  That be said, I let him proceed with the change and voila all was fixed.

KUDO’s are DUE!

This time I do need to admit the service from Shaw surprised me and I have to say it went well and my expectations were far exceeded.  Still need to rant a little though.