Covad Install and Initial Impressions
The guy from Covad came up this morning and hooked up my T1. He was very surprised, and very relieved, that he did not have to run a single wire up the side of my house. I had enough pairs running between the demarc and the patch panel inside the house. After some playing around with my patch panel and a lot more time configuring and upgrading my Cisco router, my T1 was up and running. He gave me my static IPs and my router’s admin password and that, along with a lot of conversation in between, was pretty much it. Process took about an hour.
There are some things that occurred to me during the install that would have been helpful to have known:
- I knew Covad had a website, but at least as part of the Blogger Relations package, I wasn’t given a login to the customer service sections. Part of the overall evaluation of the process has to include the customer website to report issues and do other things. I’ve pinged my Covad contact about this to see if I can get access to that.
- I’d like to be able to change the reverse DNS for the IPs assigned to me. I presume that would be something I could do on their site, but I need a login.
- The tech was surprised that I did not know my IPs beforehand. Not a huge deal for me since I cannot actually use them until the connection arrived, but it might have been helpful to know beforehand.\
Now at my house, I have three different connectivity options: A 10/1.5 Cable connection from Wave Broadband, a 1.5/896 DSL connection from Qwest, and now a T1 from Covad. Much like Ken Camp did, I am going to run some tests to see how well this all works. To try and minimize the number of variables that might affect things, I am going to use the same gear to test all three connections at around the same time: some kind of PC or Mac (haven’t decided which yet) hooked in (via Ethernet) to a Linksys WRT54G, which I will then move between the three connections and test.
I did some brief tests and discovered that the T1 was working more or less as advertised. Throughput was higher on the upstream for some reason than on the downstream, but the latency was nice and low. Might be a router issue that I should look into before launching into full-scale testing.
