by

Irate

Once I got online Monday, the internet worked like a charm. Yesterday, no problem getting on and I stayed connected for FIFTEEN HOURS STRAIGHT.

So when I got up this morning and couldn’t connect, I actually wasted a full hour trying to get the f’in Mifi to not go dormant. I had a strong signal and was getting pages to come up, but then the Mifi would drop the connection. I rebooted and rebooted and rebooted and finally realised that a full hour had gone by and I was not going to get online at home.

I’m having trouble up here on the hill, too, so it looks like the Mifi is the principle culprit of my internet issues now that the boosting problems have been essentially resolved. Of course, it’s now too late to return it and try something else. Especially frustrating is that I love the Mifi when it decides to work because it’s nice to be able to connect several devices at once.

It is just so ridiculous that less than 12 hours ago, I was streaming Netflix and now I can’t even get online. Absolutely nothing has changed except that I turned the service off overnight.

Anyway, I got my files for the day so I’m off to work. I hate getting such a late start. Looks like another loooong day.

9 thoughts on “Irate”

  1. I don’t know how true this is, but I have heard that providers can manipulate the amount of bandwidth customers use. If you were on for 15 hours straight, yesterday, then they may be limiting your usage. Again, I don’t know how true it is, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it were.

    Maybe someone with more knowledge will pipe in.

    Don’t know how accurate this article is, but I’m sure you could get some insight on the web or in one of the forums.
    http://www.wikihow.com/Test-for-Bandwidth-Limiting-by-Your-ISP

  3. I was connected, but I wasn’t using the connection all that time. I checked my logs and I only had about five total hours of activity, and that wasn’t consecutive. In terms of bandwidth, it was only about 400MB for the whole day. I had used way more the day before. So it’s definitely not a throttling issue.

    I’m now having very intermittent crappy service at home.

  5. I do not have an iPhone.

    And I still don’t think the signal was the problem.

    My Verizon phone doesn’t have service out here, not even up the hill. There, I can usually get on long enough to check voicemail, but that’s it. Now that I have put the antenna closer to the ground, I get enough signal on the phone here, at home, to know if I have a voicemail to go check up the hill. But the Mifi won’t connect or stay connected to said signal. I’ve done research and flakiness appears normal for the Mifi, so I guess it was designed by the idiots at Microsoft. *rolls eyes*

    Also, I’ve been getting two bars pretty consistently since I moved the antenna down and the RSSI has been averaging 95, so, again, proof that the signal is not the issue.

  6. I read on a forum about the MiFi going dormant. I think it has to do with being in a marginal signal area; when it detects a weak signal it goes dormant to save battery. I believe there is a setting that will turn-off the dormant feature. Perhaps you could search the internet for this issue. Sorry I couldn’t be more specific.

  7. That’s right. And the workaround is to stay plugged in on ‘USB tether mode’, so my Mifi is always plugged in. Of course, this means that it beeps every five minutes to tell me that it’s charged and needs to be unplugged. *rolls eyes*.

    Being a Mac user, I have ZERO patience with anything computer-related that acts illogically/erratically. When a Mac is flaky, there’s a specific, findable, solvable reason why. Unfortunately, most gadgets are designed with the Microsoft model in mind. As I read once, if such people designed cars, the car brakes would randomly stop and every once in a while your car would explode and we’d all think that was perfectly normal.

    I’m not saying Macs are perfect; there’s tons about them that make me roll my eyes. But I have never wanted to throw my Mac off a cliff.

  8. We have the same Sierra wireless aircard from Telus and also find it flakey. It was even flakey for us in Vernon where we had 2 bars of LTE! It really hates weak signals.
    We finally dragged our old 3g USB stick out of mothballs and plugged it into our cradle point router, problem solved. Pretty annoying considering what the mifi cost.
    Having said that, there is a function to turn off audio signals on the mifi, you will find it on the device when you click through the start up pages with the power button.

  9. One thing that actually helps and makes me feel better is to yank the battery. Don’t know why, but it never fails to make the Mifi behave. I was getting moderate connectivity today and then the device kept going dormant, even in ethernet mode. I rebooted and shut down completely a few times before pulling the battery for 10 seconds and now I’m back online. I’m not going to bother rebooting from now on as the only thing that works is taking the battery out.

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