Rant 379 / WHAT THE...?!?

One of my worst nightmares have come to pass. NO INTERNET!!!

Here's the story:

I've been getting a weak signal from my router, so I was looking for ways to improve that. One way was to move the modem and router to a closer location, but I couldn't do it till everyone else is asleep.

At around 3.30am just now, I tried to move my modem by unplugging it from the splitter (which splits the connection from the cable point to both my TV and modem) and bringing it to somewhere else, only to discover that the cable point over there is an outdated one from ages past.

So I brought it back and screw the cable back in exactly the way it was. Only there was one problem: NO CONNECTION!

For unknown reasons, though everything was exactly the way it was before I did anything, the modem was unable to connect to the Internet. I googled for every possible phrase and name related to this and tried everything I found, to no avail.

An hour later, I had to resort to calling tech support over at Starhub. Fortunately it's on 24/7 to cater to Singaporeans overseas (I think).

The guy at Starhub was asleep, as expected. He sounded quite awake at first but eventually his speech changed into something quite close to mumbling.

Given his mental state he was still very polite, I'll give him that, but totally useless. Everything he could read out from his manual, I've already tried. Several times. Everything. Hell, I've even tried something he didn't ask, which was to switch the ends of that cable (because both ends are the same). Also done about 4 times.

In the end, he suggested the final resort - house call. He would send someone over to my place to check on the modem to find out what was wrong. First thing I asked at that point was the service charge for that. According to the Starhub website, there was a $50+ fee for something related to such a service but I couldn't quite recall the conditions.

He told me there would be no fee if the problem isn't related to the network or computer. I'm pretty sure my problem cannot be in MY network nor can it be in my computers. You see, I've done all of the following:

1) unplug 1 or both ends of wire and replugging
2) turn off modem and wait for 2-5 minutes before turning on again
3) connect laptop directly to modem via ethernet wire
4) connect modem directly to cable point
5) do 1 and 2 at the same time
6) do 2 and 4 at the same time
7) check the ends of that cable to see if anything was not as it should be
8) unplug both ends of cable and switch the ends for the splitter and modem
9) do 8 and 2 at the same time
10) bash head on wall repeatedly


Okay, I'll admit that I didn't actually complete step 10, but I was pretty close to doing it. That wall was so tempting... so... tempting...

So now I've got an appointment in the evening. The earliest he could find in his file was between 6.30-8.30pm tonight, 12 hours from now. I'm pretty desperate, so I'm not complaining.

At the moment I'm using the portable USB modem with shitty ping that I can't play games on, so I'm handing it to my bro later when he wakes up. It may also help to alleviate his mood problems when he finds out. My mum should be fine without her MMO for a day. It sucks to play games when they're repainting the area near her computer anyway.



EDIT:

It's 6.45am and I've discovered that everything is okay again! What the hell is going on? That modem gave me so much trouble for 3 hours and suddenly the problem just disappeared! My best guess is that it takes a very long time to connect after powering up. At least 10 minutes.