The Great Derecho of 2020 and my Internet Provider

 

As you may have heard, the Great Derecho of 2020 knocked out our power, this was on Monday 8/10/2020. I was at work and didn't see the storm, but felt it effects as I saw many Midwestern Financial Institutions loose power. By the time I got home, the power was back on in my direct neighborhood. What we didn't have was Internet.

Our source of internet became my phone where I would use it as a hotspot and then connect my laptop to it. By Thursday, the internet came back on, but it was spotty and slow. It would still drop for hours at a time and the bandwidth we were getting was terrible. Linux has a tool to estimate your band width, so I did put some statistics together:

	Upload (Megabits)	Download (Megabits)
Min	1.46	0.08
Max	3.76	1.71
Average	2.56	0.58
Std. Dev.	0.99	0.65

Just for the record, the Download speed is supposed to be much higher then upload speed. We knew Mediacom was having trouble and I figured it was them. I didn't see any point in calling them because they have lied to me before. They will always tell me it is my modem, that way they don't have to refund any money.

Cheryl's employer lost their modem with the storm or right before. I thought we should wait a few days and see returns to normal. By Saturday it had not. Cheryl wanted to know if we should buy a new modem, but I wasn't convinced it was our modem yet. So after dinner Saturday night, I googled “How to check your cable modem” or something like that. I found the following page:

https://www.wikihow.com/Diagnose-Cable-Modem-Issues

It turns out all I had to do was point my web browser to 192.168.100.1 and enter a user and password found on the modem and I could see the condition of the router. The above web page had what the good values were and what the power ranges needed to be. I went over the stats for a good twenty minutes and realized there was nothing wrong with our modem.

After going over all the stats, I decided to run the Linux Command to test the speed. The upload speed was over 3 megabits, but the download speed was now over 78 megabits. Hmm, I wonder if my big brother Mediacom was watching me. That improvement happened awfully close to me checking the modem state and now it was normal. I know they are talking to my modem all of the time. It is possible they can watch to see when the internal web page is accessed.