Our home in Willow Glen (San Jose), California, may be in the Silicon Valley
but it is at the same time in a technological wilderness (“way out in the tulies”
as we say here). We have the misfortune to be 18,000 feet from the closest
central phone office. DSL service only works effectively within 15,000 feet of a
central phone office. That extra 3,000 feet means that we have often had
terrible Internet access, alternating with acceptable service or no service
at all. During the last ten years, we have paid the following Internet
Service Providers (ISPs):
- Sprint (broadband antenna) this service is no longer available
- Covad (DSL)
- AT&T (DSL)
- Etheric – Home-based Business Plan (point to point wireless)
- Comcast – Business Class (cable broadband, cable modem)
The five ISPs have linked our house to the Internet through different technical means. This week, we switched to Comcast and so far the service and
performance have been excellent. We have had two different ISP antennas
strapped to our chimney; we now have a new Comcast cable box in our basement.
Working from home requires 3 major technical elements to function and
interact well:
- Infrastructure at work: servers, routers, virtual private network (VPN),
emergency power system, etc. - ISP – Internet Service Provider (delivers customer access to the Internet)
- Home equipment: VPN router, firewall, printer, monitor, keyboard,
Sun Ray on my desk,
uninterruptible power supply (UPS) under the desk, etc.
When my husband (John
Plocher) was laid off from Sun several months ago, I joined one of Sun’s work
from home programs for support on the days when I am not in my Menlo Park
office. We have all of the new equipment in place at home and working well
but regularly unusable for one reason or another. We could not tell where
the problems came from each time but suspected it was mostly our ISP.
I have been an enthusiastic
Sun Ray
user for over ten years – since the product was in its final testing before
being transferred out of Sun Labs.
I love being able to pop my card out at work then back in at home (or in
Prague for that matter) using the same session.
I hope that switching to yet another new provider will improve our
home access to the point where it just works and we don’t ever have to think
about it again.
KatysBlog 