Paul’s Tech Makeover: Internet and Mesh Wi-Fi (Premium)

As you may know, we’re moving to Pennsylvania next month, and I’m using this change as an excuse to re-evaluate the personal technology we use at home. And hopefully get some of it right for a change.

The most fundamental technology, of course, is the Internet connection. I was led to believe—and was excited by this—that we’d be able to get FIOS service here in Pennsylvania, but that was revealed to be a sad joke: When I checked their site from here, rather than at home, FIOS gleefully told me it “had me covered.” And then offered DSL plans with speeds of .5 to 15 Mbps. I can get 1 Gbps (1000 Mbps) from FIOS at home.

Yikes.

So I did a bit of shopping around, “bit” being the key word there, since there are so few options. What I arrived at was RCN, because no one ever chooses cable modem these days, they just end up there because there’s no better choices. Here in Emmaus, RCN offers a service that is 330 Mbps down … but only 20 Mbps up. (FIOS is bi-directional, so that 1 Gbps service, like their others, is the same speed upand down.)

Now, I know what many of you are thinking: 330 Mbps down is incredible—which it is—and 20 Mbps isfine. Which it would be if I didn’t record video podcasts every single day and need to share the connectivity with others. In truth, it probably will be fine. But I’d give RCN more money, happily, if they just doubled that upload speed.

Speaking of which, the cost: RCN charges a reasonable $59.99 per month for this access, plus I’m paying $10 per month for the cable modem. The total monthly bill, with taxes, is just over $80 per month.

But it’s a bit more nuanced than that.

I could buy my own modem, and if I’m going to be using RCN long enough, that may make sense. I will reevaluate that option after we actually move in late August, but for now I’ll just stick with their modem.

RCN can also charge you an additional $10 per month for what they call “the router,” by which they mean enabling the Wi-Fi features of the cable modem. (I believe the four Ethernet ports on the back of that modem all work.) But as you may recall, I purchased a Google Wifi mesh network with three access points, and will be using that instead. So I declined the router option.

I’m not sure how well I’ve described our moving situation, but it bears on this story.

So the short version goes like this: We’re buying a family home in Pennsylvania, but we can’t actually move until late August because we had previously scheduled a home swap for the first two weeks in August in our current home with a family from Spain. This actually works out well for the seller—Sharon, the mother of three of my sisters—because she’s been in the home for 25 years and has lots of stuff there. So she’s been able to go through all that stuff even after moving into a nearby townhouse. (It’s right around the corner.)

Back in Dedham, we cleaned up our house, painted it, redid some of the landscaping, and performed other related tasks before putting it up for sale, and we temporarily stored our extraneous stuff in a local storage unit. Our house sold quickly, but we’re in this holding pattern. So for the past month or so, we’ve been visiting Pennsylvania a lot, moving our things out of storage and into the new house, helping Sharon get her stuff out of there, and arranging for all the things we have to upgrade at the new house: Paint, appliances, lighting, electrical fixtures, and so on.

Oh, and the Internet.

On our previous trip, I arranged for RCN to install the cable modem at 9 am on July 13, this past Thursday. We drove down to Pennsylvania again on Tuesday, I went to D.C. for the day for the live Windows Weekly recording at Microsoft Inspire on Wednesday (90 minutes of driving, to Wilmington, and then 90 minutes in the train, each way) while my wife handled some painting estimates and other things at the new house. And yesterday morning, I headed over to the house early for the Internet hookup.

My relationship with RCN got off to a bad start. Which I was clear about when I called them a bit after 9 am.

“Our relationship is getting off to a bad start,” I told the RCN customer service representative over the phone when my promised 9 am appointment never arrived. To my surprise, she was pretty great about fixing things, and could see that I had previously set up an account but that the appointment had mysteriously disappeared. I would have been OK—not great, but OK—with a Friday re-do. But she said she would try to squeeze me in that day. Nice.

The only issue was that the time for this new appointment was unclear. So the technician who would be installing the cable modem would call first, so I could be there when he arrived.

We had other things going on that day—a new LG washer and dryer set (Sharon’s washer was literally built in 1980, if you can believe that, and it barely worked)—and some other estimates. So we spent most of the day in the new house, working. Me, in a yard sale chair purchase in a room full of our crap, which we had previously moved out of that storage unit.

The technician arrived just before 3 pm. He was excellent, and I have to say, the two people from RCN I’ve interacted with may have completely changed my tune on the cable Internet access business. He called, as promised, arrived soon thereafter, was clearly competent and friendly, and set about getting me online very quickly. It was a pleasant experience.

But there is one curiosity to this connection, to me at least.

I’ve had a fiber connection through FIOS for many years now, so it’s been a while since I even thought about the logistics of cable. But the way this works at home, I think, is that a literal cable—coaxial back in the day, but I’m not sure how it’s done now—is strung from a telephone pole to the house, and connected to some access point on the inside of an exterior wall. From there, you run whatever cable—probably coaxial—through the house to wherever the cable modem is.

I write that like it makes any sense, but, again, I’ve had FIOS for a long time, and there is no actual coaxial in my current home anymore. We’ve long since moved past this.

Here in Pennsylvania, the cable between the street and the house is run under the ground. I love that: It removes the ugly and weather-susceptible wires and telephone poles from the equation. Inside the house, it’s basically the same setup as I described above. But apparently, my father, when he was still living here years ago, wired the house with coaxial. Which means that there is a coax port, sometimes more than one, in basically every room in the house.

This has interesting ramifications. It means that the cable modem can basically be anywhere in the house, which the technician verified by checking the signal on a few ports. That’s really flexible, and perhaps the first evidence that my father got something right. (I’ll discuss the lighting controls later if I can stomach it.)

Anyway, the technician installed the cable modem in a room next to the one I’ve chosen for my office, as Sharon is using that room now as a staging area, of sorts, for what I consider to be junk. But is, in fact, very important to her, so that’s fine.

And that was it. I verified that the connection worked using an Ethernet cable—remember, no Wi-Fi directly from RCN—and made sure we were getting the advertised speeds (330 Mbps down, 20 Mbps up), and we were. Actually, it’s even a bit better than that.

So the next task was setting up Google Wifi. I was hoping this would be a simple and seamless process, that the idiot-proof Google wizard would step me through the proper configuration and placement of the access points. That something would just work the first time in perhaps forever, and that this wouldn’t be yet another stress hanging over me.

It was even better than I’d imagined.

Which, to be fair to Google, I could have perhaps imagined: Having used other Google hardware products like OnHub and Home, I’ve seen how good user experience can really impact the process of doing something that, previously, had been too complex for most people. Google Wifi is just more of the same. It’s great.

The one weirdism, for some, is that the setup and configuration of this product occurs entirely via a mobile app, in this case the Google Wifi app. That means you need an Android handset or an iPhone—I used an iPhone—to do anything. There’s no web interface, as is common with other such devices.

Each Google Wifi access point has the same three ports: A USB-C port for power, an Ethernet port for connecting to the cable modem, and a second Ethernet port for expansion via a switch or some directly-wired device. I only needed two of these—the Ethernet port for the cable modem connection, and power—to get the first access point up and running. And just power on the two remote access points.

(I’ll evaluate the need for a switch after we move. I do use an 8-port switch in our current home.)

Setup couldn’t be easier: I plugged the two cables into the first access point and powered it up. Then, using the Google Wifi app, I configured the network and the access point, and told it that I would be installing three access points total. So the wizard then walked me through the configuration of the other access points, in turn, which involved naming each and not much else. I placed one access point on each floor—upstairs, downstairs, and the basement, which is finished—and the app tested the mesh to make sure it was optimally configured and that the placement of each access point was correct.

I probably had Wi-Fi going within just a few minutes. And the full mesh network up and running in under 10 minutes. The app noted that my download speed was “more than 200 Mbps” down and 20 Mbps up, or what Google calls “blazing fast” speeds. Cute.

Google Wifi offers other features I’m not using yet, like a guest network, smart device integration, and IPv6 support. But the big deal for me, aside from the sheer ease of this configuration, is that I can monitor it, turn it on and off, and change the configuration remotely. I don’t have to be in the house to get this done.

In fact, I had the chance to test this capability when my wife, brother-in-law, sister, and me were driving to a store in the pouring rain last night. My sister commented that her mother, Sharon, had often complained that the Internet connection died when it was raining, and since the basic connection from the street was unchanged, maybe I’d have this issue too. So I ran a network check from my phone. A few different times. No issues.

Look, there are a lot of stresses related to any move, and for this one, in particular, given its suddenness and unexpectedness, my wife and I are pretty much on edge regularly now. Getting the Internet up and running, and in an error-free way, minus the initial appointment snafu, has been a great relief.

Long story short, Internet achieved.

In the future, I’ll detail some of the other tech-related changes we’re making. I had discussed our desire to go cable TV-free, and as noted, my RCN connection is Internet (IP) only. So we’ll be experimenting with services like YouTube TV soon. The house has a weird collection of late 1990’s/early 2000’s-era Lutron lightning controls, and all of that is going. But I’m not sure yet which form of smart lighting/smart control we will use. Just that it’s all going.

There’s more, but you have to start somewhere. And it will be a while before we’re back in Pennsylvania. We’re planning to be home for the next two weeks, then we have two weeks in Spain, and then a disaster of a week in which we have to empty our house and move it, get my daughter into her high school orientation, hand over our house to the new owners, and then drive all three cars (including my son’s) down to Pennsylvania and move into the new house. The paint, the electrical stuff, and other improvements will all happen after that.

So it’s going to be a busy month. I’ll let you know how it goes.