On Friday morning, my internet went out some time in the middle of the night. I woke up to my Unifi router with alerts and when this has happened in the past I just make sure it’s back online. Well, on that day, the internet was not back on and had been out for many hours by the time I woke up. So, I went downstairs to check on the modem to see if it’s working.

When I saw the modem, it was blinking a blue light which weirdly on this modem means there’s a problem. I did the power cycle on all the devices and still no dice.

At this point, I contact Quantum and they checked on their side and said there’s some issue with the line that comes into our house. Long story short, I eventually figured out that the fiber cable about a foot’s length away from the modem connection was bent and broken, this severed the connection and is not something I can repair myself.

So now, it’s Tuesday and I’m waiting for them to send a technician hopefully today. The Quantum response times are so bad when the internet goes down that I wish there was other options here. I’ve debated getting a secondary back up internet service or even a completely separate internet provider to deal with this but so far the search has not panned out very well. First, there’s a duopoly of AT&T and Xfinity in the Portland area, Quantum is owned by AT&T. Second, there’s no small providers that have coverage in most of Portland.

The ideal case for a city like Portland would be to have their own broadband provider, something that the city or Metro owns and manages. Metro is the perfect entity to do this because they encompass the overall metro area around here and they have planning authority. But, that’s a pipe dream in an American city in this day and age.

Well, working from home and having a very connected home seems to break down very quickly once the backbone of all that goes down. The router can only do so much, connect devices (Mac ↔ Mac), allow them to play media (phone to Sonos speakers), but ultimately it will come down to having a working internet connection to do much of the useful stuff.

I have US Mobile as my provider and I’m subscribed to their mid-tier $270 a year plan which gives me 10 gigs of hotspot data. This data has been useful over the last few days but I’ve used it up by now. As of this writing, I’m also at ~21 gigs out of 80 gigs of my high speed data on the phone. Meaning, I’ve been using the phone’s data liberally and having that has been a huge help. But, there’s something about most of my devices being offline that really irks me right now. It seems like they’re just dead right now.

Over the past few days, I’ve come to realize just how much the internet permeates through my day, even with the a working phone connection, there’s things like the TV that plays background music or Spotify that plans on the Sonos speakers.

There’s the other issue of working on the internet, I rely on dozens of tools to get work done. From chatting and meeting with colleagues on Slack and Google Meet, sometimes even Zoom, to working with AI, all of it feels very sluggish and unreliable with a hotspot. This is something I just didn’t even think about while having a strong internet connection.

Some things I noticed while being mostly on slower data while using my computer, this was apparent after I ran into my 10 gig hotspot quota and it slowed down to legacy 3G speeds.

AI chatbots are great at doing the web search etc for you because they outsource it back to their own servers and the info you’re transacting is mostly text.

Kagi Search is amazing at slower data. Search results load fast and there’s hardly an JS on their webpage so I see the results right away.

Spotify is trash when trying to stream on slower data, songs skip, the quality is not degraded and instead the playback is just stuttering.

Most SaaS services are unusable like Asana, Slack, Figma, Notion, and Github.

Gmail is very reliable still, behaves like an offline app. So does Fastmail.

Most websites are very badly optimized for slower data, their images are blown out, take forever to load, and the JS bundles are huge so the website is broken until the data is fully downloaded by the browser.