Wired for Speed

I noted last time that my NOLA-to-Vista move did not include any large appliances. However, I did bring with me a large (5' x 28" x 24") desk that I got from a thrift store in Philadelphia for $35 in a real steal of a deal not quite twenty years ago. Shortly after my belongings arrived, I and my father moved my desk into my bedroom, and then I set up my computer.

If you've followed my blogging efforts, then you know that I've been embarrassingly procrastinative about upgrading my dial-up Internet connection to a broadband Internet connection. Now, here in Vista I could continue to access the Web via my EarthLink dial-up service if I really wanted to, but anyone who has gone from dial-up to broadband can tell you that surfing the Web with a dial-up connection is akin to working with one hand tied behind your back, and I have rather had my fill of the dial-up experience, as you can well imagine.

My Intel Core 2 Duo iMac is equipped with an AirPort Extreme card via which I can piggyback on a neighbor's Cox cable Internet connection, but I don't want to do that either. My father himself has an AT&T U-verse DSL Internet connection, however, and I'm thinking, "There's gotta be some way I can hook up my computer to his system, right?"

An AT&T technician who we'll call "James" set up my father's U-verse system in June 2013. When James was done setting up the system, he didn't give my father a manual therefor but he did leave behind a four-page leaflet containing an AT&T "pledge" - It is my goal to provide the best service experience possible … blah blah blah - and a brief survey and other information. The leaflet's second page features James' work phone number, so I called the number and left a relevant message on his voicemail; my intuition told me that running an Ethernet cable from my computer to the system was all I needed to do, but I thought it would be a good idea to check with him to make sure.

While I was waiting for James to return my call, it occurred to me: Dude, why don't you do some homework on this? Whenever you are having some kind of problem with a computer, you can take it to the bank that someone out there has experienced that exact same problem - there are no new computer problems under the sun. So I went to Google and did a U-verse connect second computer search.

As it happened, I didn't need to get any help from 'someone out there': my search's first page of results linked to a series of articles from AT&T itself addressing my issue. The first of these hits, a "Connecting a computer to your Wi-Fi home network" article, recommended:

Try This First
Once you've switched your wireless to On, have your Wi-Fi Network Name and password (found on the side of your AT&T provided gateway) available to enter into your network connections.

I myself am a big believer in trying the simplest things first. I trotted over to the 2Wire i38HG residential gateway connected to my father's computer and wrote down the SSID and WI-FI KEY values that appeared thereon (below the third bar code). I went back to my computer, opened the Network pane of the System Preferences application, selected the AirPort option in the pane's left-hand menu, and turned AirPort on. Gratifyingly, the SSID value appeared in the pane's Network Name menu; upon selecting the value I was prompted for a password. I entered the WI-FI KEY value into the Password field and clicked the button. Within a few seconds the pane displayed an AirPort is connected … message. Yes!

FYI:
• The second U-verse connect second computer result, a "Connecting Computers to the AT&T U-verse Gateway" .pdf, confirmed that I could indeed interface with the system by Ethernetically connecting my computer to the gateway.
• An i38HG gateway manual Google search led me to a user guide applicable to the system.

James never did return my call - let's hear it for AT&T's award-winning customer service, eh? But all's well that ends well. I now have a DSL connection to the Web; it's not that fast of a connection in absolute terms - AT&T's own High Speed Internet Speed Test page clocks its download speed at about 7.6 megabits per second - but it's waaayyyy faster than dial-up. At long last I can watch YouTube cat videos! ;-)

An elephant remains in the room: What am I gonna do about my EarthLink dial-up account? As of this writing, I am paying $21.95/month for a service I would seem to not be using. However, I am actually getting something for that money:
(1) EarthLink's home.earthlink.net server hosts about 7 MB of external files - demos and images - for my blogs.
(2) Much less importantly, I still use the email part of the service to some extent, although I have now routed most of my email traffic to my apeak02@gmail.com address.

If I were to cancel my EarthLink service, then EarthLink would immediately pull the plug on the home.earthlink.net material, which would leave 'holes' in many of my blog entries, and that would really bum me out, to put it mildly. Given the time and energy it would take to migrate my stuff to another Web hosting service, is it worth it to stay with EarthLink, at least for the short term? Stay tuned.