After roughly three years, we had our first AT&T internet outage. For what it’s worth, I had problems with Cox Cable about once a week — sometimes they were outages but more commonly it was just long periods (hours or days) of degraded service. It seems like multiple times a week I was contacting Cox’s technical support only to be told the problem was on “my side”, even though my neighbors were having the same issue. Even when it was working “properly” only ever got about 1/3 of the gigabit speeds I was paying for. The minute AT&T fiber became available in my area, I switched and haven’t been happier.

Last Monday, Memorial Day, our internet stopped working. We noticed the outage about two hours after the mowers left so I kind of suspected they accidentally cut something. There’s one small area where our wires are exposed, but I couldn’t see any damage there so Susan contacted AT&T, who told us the problem was on “our side” (it’s always “our side”) and they would dispatch a technician to come out on Tuesday.

Tuesday afternoon, Susan received a text informing her that the problem was on “their side” (finally!), saying it was “damage caused by wildlife.” The field directly behind us has cows, bison, and occasionally coyotes, although the prime suspect in these instances is usually Mr. Squirrel.

Late Tuesday evening we were informed that the problem was on “our side” again and that a technician would be dispatched on Wednesday.

Susan and I both do work from home. We are able to use our phones as hotspots and it didn’t take long before my work computer was tethered to my work phone, my home computer was tethered to my work phone, and Susan was using her phone as a hotspot for both her computer and the living room television.

The technician arrived Wednesday and was able to determine our fiber had broke “about 200′ from here” which meant somewhere in my backyard. (The pedestal is in the far back corner of my yard and the cable has to run around the workshop and the pool.) I always find I have things in common with technical repair guys and the guy who came out was in the process of building a metal workshop at home, has a truck camper with a setup similar to my van’s, and used to work on old phone equipment. I’m pretty sure I caught him eyeing my payphone…

Based on the location of the cut, we decided it was less likely the mower and more likely, based on the piles of dirt in the backyard, a gopher.

Looking back at the past two days, it’s interesting that we spent most of our time trying to figure out other ways to access the internet than we did finding other things to do. I could have gone for a walk or to a movie or anything, but instead I spent most of my time trying to figure out ways to get things “back online.”

Anyway, everything’s back online now. Maybe it’s time to take that walk!