Technical Difficulties

I haven't gotten to blog in a while because my network connection has been spotty.  Unfortunately, it's spotty for the same, or nearly the same, reason I have a connection at all.  In short: I'm stealing it.  Of course, it's not as simple as all that, it's more like I'm trespassing, camping out on somebody else's lawn.  I live in an apartment building and one of my neighbors is using a wireless router which is designed to provide internet access to a far wider area than my neighbor actually needs.  This is kind of like having an extra large back yard.  Either by choice or because my neighbor lacks technical expertise she has configured her router to do so without any encryption.  This is like leaving the gate to your back yard unlocked and hanging open.  I've taken possession of a little corner of her yard back behind some trees where no one will notice, and I'm even keeping that small area mowed, weeded and in good repair.


Ok, so that's not a perfect metaphor.  It might be closer to say that I'm making use of my neighbor's garden hose while she's away.  Water is trivial and she has more than she'll ever need.  But that doesn't really work because even water is a metered utility and her internet is unmetered.


Anyway, the reason my connection is spotty is because my neighbor is using Charter Cable for her high-speed internet.  It's a good choice because it's affordable and much faster than some of the alternatives.  Unfortunately, it's also a bad choice for two reasons:

1. It's a shared connection.
That's right, everyone on the block who subscribes to cable high speed internet is sharing that bandwith with all of her neighbors.  Now, the speed of this connection is so high that most don't even notice, but when multiple neighbors are streaming video, teleconferencing, or playing video games with your friends over the Internet, even cable high speed can get bogged down.

2. It's unreliable.
Don't believe what ads tell you.  Whenever your cable goes out, and in some areas it goes out a lot, your internet and sometimes your phone will go out with it.  And it will stay out until your cable provider sends out a technician to fix it.

Here's the worst part: Even if your cable TV is working fine, your internet can sometimes go out for no discernable reason.  Actually, there's several different reasons, but they all come down to this: your modem loses block sync.  Let me explain a little more clearly.  "Modem" stands for MOdualator/DEModulator.  It's a device with two jobs: in one direction (Modulation), it converts the digital (on-and-off) signals used by your computer to communicate with the Internet into an analog or continuous signal (similar to a sound wave but using electricity) which can be sent down your cable company's coaxial line (You know that fat cable that comes through the wall or maybe the floor and connects to the back of your TV?  Well, there's one of those that connects to your modem as well).  In the other direction (Demodulation) it does the opposite, converting the continuous analog signals from your cable company back into digital signals which carry data.  In order to do this, your modem has to be SYNC'd with your cable provider.  Think about it like this: your modem has a clock, and so does your cable provider.  In order to communicate at the speeds they do, the two clocks, which tick around 300 thousand times a second, must be ticking at exactly the same time.  In other words, they must be synchronized.  If your modem's clock is off by just a little bit, it loses BLOCK sync (modems are connected to the provider in groups or blocks.  Remember what I said about it being a shared connection?).


Now, losing block sync is usually a simple fix.  All you need to do is unplug your modem and plug it back in again.  If you're using a router (a device to allow you to connect multiple computers through a single modem), you'll need to restart it as well.  But how did you lose block sync in the first place?  Block sync gets lost because communications between your modem and the cable company were temporarily interrupted because, at some point, the coaxial cable was cut.  Maybe it was cut a long time ago and now there's noise on the line, or maybe it was cut and spliced back together again just today.  In other words, the most likely reason you lost block sync is because someone in your neighborhood is stealing cable.


Acquiring illegal cable is easy to do.  If your neighbor has cable, there has to be an access point where the cable can enter her house.  Sometimes it's overhead, sometimes it's buried, but an actual cable must enter her house at some point.  Find the cable.  Cut it.  Place an end connector on each side of the cut cable.  Reconnect the cut ends using a splitter (you can buy all these parts and the necessary tools at RadioShack) and branch off your own cable using the same splitter.  Run the new line into your house.  You may need to purchase a descrambler (which you can order out of the back of Popular Mechanics) to decode the signal.  That's all.


Assuming you did all this correctly, and your neighbor is a high speed internet subscriber she will lose block sync only once.  If, however, you did a shoddy job or sometimes even if your job was perfect, she will ever after have extra noise on her line which will cause her to lose block sync again and again.  Every time, she will have to restart her modem and router again.  If the hassle of restarting her modem and router becomes too great, she can have her cable company send a technician to her home to see what the problem is.  The technician will remove the illegal splitter and splice the cable  back together.  Sometimes it works, but spliced cable also causes noise and sometimes they have to run a brand new cable.  Technicians rarely report illegal splitters because they're on a tight schedule and because it's not their job.  At any rate, there's usually nothing to stop the neighbor from going out and putting in another illegal splitter.


All of this is a roundabout way of explaining why my internet connection is spotty right now.  My neighbor, who's wireless internet I'm effective stealing, keeps losing block sync because another neighbor is stealing her cable.  When the internet goes down there's nothing I can do until my neighbor restarts her modem and router.  Right now, I'm running Aircrack which is a program to decode the WEP key encryption of a different neighbor who has DSL.  So hopefully, soon, I'll no longer have this problem.