Two weeks of flipping switches, moving cables, and negotiating with customer service

When I last posted, I was patting myself on the back for successfully disconnecting our house from cable TV and becoming the ultimate streamer. Little did I know that my fun was just beginning. The last two weeks have been an educational experience.

With all the streaming I anticipated, I thought I needed a really fast internet connection coming into the house so I could distribute it to every corner of the home with my Wi-Fi extenders.

My provider had several plans with 1 gigabit service, and that sounded pretty good to me. But which plan should I choose? Each had a different set of add-ons: Netflix with Plan A; Disney-Hulu combo with Plan B; 6 streamers and a fixed rate for 5 years with Plan C.

I made my choice and then attempted to set up the newly included streaming channels. Each channel presented a different challenge, but all required hours on hold with customer service, “escalations” to a higher power, or creative workarounds. After all the tweaking, I can now receive 99% of the channels I expected in my package. As with most things, perfection remains elusive.

Then came the biggest challenge: getting all those megabytes to the TVs, computers, and other devices in the house. I was baffled by how slow everything seemed to start up, and all the buffering that was happening, so I turned to my friend ChatGPT.

In the last two weeks, I’ve had a lengthy dialogue with the AI program that occupies a prominent place on my computer screen. We’ve discussed bridges, switches, and configurations. Networking maps have been created and discarded. At one point, the diagram looked so complicated that I briefly wondered whether I was designing a home network or trying to interpret a particularly tricky biopsy.

As the program thanked me for each new piece of information I provided, I made layout changes I never would have dared to try on my own. When I told ChatGPT that a particular change had worked, I received a resounding YES; my failures were met with a “let’s figure out what went wrong.”

Now I am happy with the system. My computer runs blazing fast (thanks to Ethernet), and the Wi-Fi for the rest of the house works fine. I look forward to years of ignoring the complex in-house network architecture and simply enjoying the benefits of my hard work.

Until the latest and greatest new thing comes along.