Good Morning!!!! 48F @ 5:15AM. Partly cloudy. High 68F. Winds light and variable.
Today is the only dry day in the 10-day here. Looks like both homes will get hit pretty good with rain tomorrow, and it'll last through at least the end of the 10-day forecast. The weather guessers are using terms like "atmospheric river"...
The Xfinity tech showed up a half hour early yesterday, what a surprise, as most run late. He replaced the cable from the monument at the street, then cleaned up the cable inside the house by replacing a splitter and taking out a few couplers. Speeds on the WiFi didn't improve much, and he blamed it on the WiFi. I did some digging, and the 802.11ac radios in the Xfinity modem are supposed to be good for 800 Mbps, but I'm only seeing half of that. I went around and disabled all the WiFi security cameras, which were also sited as problematic, and saw no improvement. I don't have any ethernet capable computers, so I can't test the speed of the ports on the Xfinity modem. But the Xfinity app on the iPhone sez the modem is seeing 118% of my plan speed, which is 1 Gbps. So now I'm looking at a new mesh system to replace the Xfinity WiFi, but I don't see any way to turn off the Xfinity WiFi should I go that way. There doesn't appear to be any way to control which WiFi channels it uses, either, and the WiFi mapping tool I use shows that the WiFi in several nearby homes is using the same channels. So I'm not convinced that adding a new mesh system will improve things if I can't tune the channels on it, and so far, I haven't found one that will. If that's the case, I should probably just drop the service level of the Xfinity package and save some money every month. Even at 400 Mbps, it's ten times faster than the Starlink system at the house up north, and the only time I ever need all that bandwidth is when downloading big system updates on the computers or the GPS.
I was hoping I could get the tech to add a couple of new cable drops, but he said they don't do any new in wall installations because they had too many techs falling down through ceilings.
So I'm on my own there.
Then there's the new tech the manufacturers are touting in the WiFi routers. It's supposed to be much faster because it uses a new 6 GHz frequency band, and since it's new, maybe you don't have as many collisions with your neighbors. But the higher frequency has less range, so you need more nodes in the mesh to cover the same area. No free lunch, huh?
I did get a little real work done; a bit more schlepping got all the hanging shelves in the garage filled and most of the junk from the mezzanine put away. Then I repositioned one of the security cams so I can see if the back porch is flooding. Finished up loading a few more things into the trailer for the trip home.
I've got some returns to drop off today, and maybe a little grocery shopping. Not sure what else will pop up...