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Our UTOPIA install is scheduled for this afternoon. After hearing numerous horror stories, I am extremely interested to see how our setup goes. When they came and trenched from the fiber box in the corner of the lawn, across the lawn, under the driveway and up to the corner of the building, the landlord and his managers were less than ecstatic. I got a frantic call at work wondering who the people were that were “digging up all the grass.” The manager wondered if we had asked them to come dig up the yard. Well, no, not exactly. We did order a public utility connection, though, so there was nothing that they could do about it, I explained. That was an interesting day. Luckily, the workers doing the trenching were fairly careful to put the lawn back together, so it is unlikely there will be any kind of lasting damage. At this point, there is a little bit of conduit sticking up at the outside corner of our kitchen wall as the only evidence that anything has changed.

The install is supposed to include the fiber termination box and router and a small UPS. Presumably this is to ensure that the phone service will still work (to provide for 911 capability) when the power goes out. I have heard from a couple of people, however, that the phone service over this network is less than stellar even when the power is on, so, really, why bother?

The company providing the internet connection over the municipality owned network requires that the end user have “something called ethernet.” This is to make it so my computer can connect “faster.” That’s what they told me on the voicemail they left the other day reminding me of the scheduled install. I can only hope that the person actually coming to perform the labor of installation is slightly more capable than the trained monkeys that I have worked with so far. We shall see.