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It left without warning.
It blipped out, and four working-from-home souls cried out in agony.
The ONT is working now but one of these indicators was an angry red during the outage(Image credit: Future / Lance Ulanoff)
Here’s what happens when your home broadband goes offline.
Your Wi-Fi still works, and teases you with a solid connection but zero communication with the outside world.
Local Wi-Fi doesn’t need the internet to work, but it’s essentially an empty vessel.
The ONT is working now but one of these indicators was an angry red during the outage(Image credit: Future / Lance Ulanoff)
The connection is devoid of useful information.
There is no cloud.
All of my smart cameras became dumb.
Everything looked fine here, but this is what was managing the WiFi.(Image credit: Future / Lance Ulanoff)
We don’t have traditional cable or an antenna, which meant our TV-watching was severely limited.
you might, it turns out, do a fair amount with tethered phones.
All of us turned on our personal hotspots and tethered our tablets and even smart TVs to our devices.
The batteries had started leaking.
I replaced them, but found that most buttons would only work when pressed with herculean force.
I did my best to tether my laptop and live-blog the constantly evolving news.
A FiOS cry for help
Without broadband, it wasn’t easy.
Uploading images was hard.
The system I was working in kept resetting, and sometimes losing my work.
The feed would cut out every five minutes or so, but it was more or less watchable.
Throughout this ordeal, there was also general frustration with Verizon.
That was a Friday.
I blanched, and told her as politely as I could that that was unacceptable.
It was a holiday weekend, which I think made finding support technicians even harder.
The broadband rescue
Monday came and they arrived.
Even my neighbor was in the dark.
“So why did you ask me to turn my box on and off?”
I told her that Verizon FiOS was finally on the job trying to troubleshoot this multi-house issue.
Multiple times the technicians asked me if anyone had been messing with my box.
I promised them I never touched it.
Finally, as the temperature plummeted late Monday my Wi-Fi online grid was flush with 600Mbps connectivity.
Throughout my home smart devices sprung to life.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go yell at some squirrels.
