Sweet Relief
February 21, 2007
The other day, I talked about an extremely annoying problem I was having with my internet connection. Sites randomly wouldn’t load in Safari, but would in Firefox. The iTunes Store would only load on some computers. It reached a head when I realized I wasn’t able to commit changes to SVN for my work-related files. In short, a truly irritating situation.
Today, my DSL was activated, and I set it up with high hopes. I was a little bit skeptical that it could really be Mediacom’s fault, since the sites would still load in different browsers.
My DSL connection is working flawlessly. I’m having no trouble whatsoever navigating to any of the sites I had trouble with. I can commit to SVN was ease. The iTunes Store loads in a snap.
Just for kicks, I tried hooking up the DSL modem and cable modem to the two ethernet ports on my Mac. When I was using the DSL connection, things were fine. I’d switch to the cable modem, and the same old problem would rear its ugly head.
I have absolutely no idea what caused these problems with Mediacom, but I know that I’ll be calling to cancel my cable internet connection first thing tomorrow morning. That should be fun.
Ah, relief, the buzzing has stopped in your ear.
The fact that Firefox works is the strange part of the equation. Any insights into why it works where Safari does not?
The thing with Firefox being able to load the sites was the strangest and the most frustrating aspect. If it wouldn’t work at all, I could have easily called and said what was wrong. But trying to explain that certain sites wouldn’t load in one browser, all the while trying to convince them it wasn’t the browser’s fault? I don’t think I stood a chance of getting that message across.
At any rate, I’m pretty happy with the DSL. BellSouth does some dumb things of their own like blocking port 25, but I use SSL for all my outgoing mail so I’m not affected. That, and my speed is now capped at 1.5 MB down / 256 KB up. That’s painful.
But I was paying over twice as much for the cable connection, and only getting a fraction of the 10 MB/1 MB speeds that were promised, so at least now I’m actually getting what I’m paying for. There’s something to be said for that. :)