The Winner Is…Telecom

Tags

internet, phone, satellite, Telecom, wireless

The really great thing about setting your expectations really low is that there is no surprise when they are met.  I mentioned yesterday that I didn’t have much faith in Telecom’s customer service.  And they didn’t disappoint.  The tech came at 2pm today, pulled out a device, plugged it into the wall, and left saying she’d return in an hour.  She came back after about 75 minutes, said the phone line was working and gave me the number.  She looked like she was packing up to go so I hurriedly unwrapped the modem/router and asked how to set it up.  She did tell me which cord went where before saying the instructions were either on the driver CD or in the package.

After she was gone, I took a deep breath, said a prayer for grace and techie smarts, and set about trying to connect to the internet.

The simple thing to do (and yes, I thought of this) is to click on the network icon on the taskbar and see if the new service’s name popped up.  Bingo!  It did.  Then it asked for the security key.  For you non-techies, that would be the password.  Well that’s where I hit a brick wall. I couldn’t find it anywhere.  Not on the box, or on the modem itself, or a quick search through the various pieces of paper inside the box.  I finally settled in to read the quick-start guide cover-to-cover (the print of which is so tiny that I have to take off my glasses, hold the guide about 4 inches from my nose and squint.)  Forget waterboarding, when it comes to torture, this is the clear winner.

I read it twice and nothing jumped out at me. I mulled over possibilities and then it hit me:  Maybe what the quick-start guide called the “WPA Pre-Shared Key” was actually the “security key”?

Wonder of wonders, it worked!  Then the registration page came up…in Italian.  I muddled through it–mostly because I’ve no idea how to make a page English unless it’s already in google search and you can push the “translate” button.  I figured it was pretty standard stuff.  It wasn’t like I was going to be agreeing to give away state secrets.

Things were going well and I pushed the continue button only to get some exclamation points and angry red bolded letters (this, I thought, is what comes of trying to fake your way through a registration process).  For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out what the problem was.

I finally had to resort to my handy-dandy satellite wireless gadget, fire it up, open an Italian to English translation page in google and copy and paste the sentences.  Turns out I had used some illegal characters in my password.  In my defense, there were several characters in the password explanation so I thought that meant I could use whichever one I wanted.  I guess not so much.

I sorted that out and rolled along.

I think I now have Telecom installed but I don’t know.  The next page instructed me to close the browser.  But I was loathe to do that until I finished this post and a little more research on some other topics.

So we’ll see.  Maybe tomorrow 🙂

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Surf’s Up!

Tags

internet, phone, satellite, wireless

Ah no my friends, I have not taken myself off to spend the weekend at one of Italy’s famous beaches.  Soon though….

This post is actually about the Internet and how one acquires service in Italy.

If you are anything like me, then you are basically a technological dunce.  Yes, I own up to the fact that I am horribly unclever when it comes to all thing technology.  I take solace, however, in the fact that since most of it will be obsolete sooner rather than later, that I’m probably not as far behind as I think.

Well, that’s probably not true, but whatever.

So naturally, as a modern woman, especially one who is a newly minted blogger, connectivity was something I gave a lot of thought to even before I left the States.  For all the good it did me…

After arriving, I asked pretty much everyone I knew what service they’d chosen, why, how much did it cost, etc.

And the answers were as varied as Italian cuisine.  The lowdown is that there are a couple of different choices.  The main Internet company in this area is Telecom.  They are analogous to the old AT&T or Ma Bell (Southwestern Bell Corporation)–before she had a bunch of babies.  For you millennial types, years ago, Ma Bell basically had a monopoly on all telephone service in the United States.  There was no competing provider, so Ma Bell could set phone rates and charge whatever they wanted.  And if you wanted a telephone in your house, you paid it.  At least until the U.S. filed an antitrust lawsuit in the early 80s.  Once that happened, the cartel was busted up, and voila, the baby bells and a host of other service providers got into the mix.

So the upshot is that for many years, Telecom was the only game in town–and had the accompanying high prices and terrible customer service.  Then, capitalism, free trade, and anti-trust fervor being what it was, other providers elbowed their way in so that now there are several to choose from.

For the sake of brevity (I know, right?) I’ll only focus on two–Aria and Linkem.  These two are basically the same, just minor differences in the packages they offer.  Linkem is internet only while Aria does offer a phone service.

The difference between Telecom and these two (and really most of the others as well) is that as far as I can tell, all except Telecom are wireless providers in the sense that they run off of satellites.  Now please remember that I am technologically challenged, so if my verbiage isn’t 100% accurate, I do apologize.

Telecom is the only one that requires your house or apartment to already have the infrastructure to support its network.  And if you don’t by now, it’s unlikely that they will build a line from your house to the road where the telephone poles and fiber optic cables are.

So for those who live in more rural areas, the wireless services make more sense.  However, I live in the big city–Pordenone–so I wasn’t necessarily convinced that Aria would be the best choice for me.  Especially when I discovered that there wasn’t an office (for lack of a better word) in Pordenone, and the signal I would be getting would be beamed from Roveredo in Piano which is a few miles north.

To complicate matters, I also wanted a regular telephone line.  Yes, one with a telephone cord that actually went into the wall.  I’m not even going to try to explain why I want one, I just do.  Yes, I am a card-carrying Luddite.  So sue me.  Aria’s phone service required the line to connect to the modem.

To make a long story short, I am going with Telecom, which I am pretty sure I will probably live to regret.  They do have a reputation for terrible customer service after all.  But I just have a feeling that overall, because of my location, that they will provide the best and most consistent service.  I have heard that internet service in this part of Italy can be spotty because we are so close to the mountains.  The tech is coming Monday to set it up so I’ll let you know how it goes.