As reported on the excellent Hallmarks blog, a call went out today to the people of Hamilton. City Council is voting tonight on whether to raise bus fares. People who think that public transit should be affordable, reliable, and convenient – in other words, people who don’t own cars and need the Hamilton Street Railway – were asked to e-mail one or more of the four city councilors who voted to raise fares last time around.

Hamilton’s transit is nothing short of pathetic, so I did just that.

To: Duvall, Scott
Sent: Wed Nov 28 13:27:33 2007
Subject: Transit Fare increase

Dear Mr. Duvall,

Please add my name to those who are OPPOSED to any transit fare increase.

Those of us who rely on the Hamilton Street Railway are keenly aware of the many deficiencies in the service offered, and of the already high fares that are being charged.

HSR service is neither convenient nor affordable, and already is generally used only by those who have no other option. Increasing fares will do nothing except to punish low income citizens of this city, and further discourage use of the HSR.

I encourage City Council to maintain or lower fares, and to increase the HSR budget significantly in order to provide the levels of services that Hamilton’s citizens deserve.

Barry Rueger

I think that I was pretty darned polite. Especially considering my opinion of Hamilton City Hall.

Here’s the response:

Thanks Barry

Your comments are well respected.

Scott

Councillor Scott Duvall
City of Hamilton
Ward 7

Whoa… read that again:

Your comments are well respected.

I ask you, what in God’s name does that mean? That he agrees? No. That he is swayed by my argument? No. That he has taken the time to offer me thoughtful response? No.

It is an entirely new, and completely meaningless phrase that allows ol’ Scott to neither agree nor disagree, or even to offer any suggestion of where he stands. Yes folks, weasel words.

That phrase was coined one hundred and seven years ago by Stewart Chaplin.

Why, weasel words are words that suck the life out of the words next to them, just as a weasel sucks the egg and leaves the shell.

Sigh. On Thursday the WIMAX was back better than ever.  Since then, nada, zilch, no sign of life.  Word from Primus support is that (I paraphrase) whatever problems are being worked on may take days, not hours to solve.

This morning sees the WIMAX back up and running, with a better connection than was previously the case. So far both web pages and e-mail are snappy and about the same as with a good DSL connection. It would seem that something was fixed during yesterday’s outage, and the improvement is noticeable.

This morning also brings a lengthy and polite e-mail from one of the Primus people, who are actually reading this blog. They have asked that I point out that this is still very much a trial of the WIMAX service, that it is being provided free of charge, and that there are still issues being worked out, both in terms of technology, and support services

Fair enough. I am more than happy to make that point.

I’m actually happy to take part in such trials, and have done so in the past. I like problem solving, and am no mean troubleshooter.

The other thing that I try to do fairly conscientiously is to separate technical issues from those related to support and other human elements. I have had experiences with superb user support in the past (Magma Communications, now owned by Primus) and horrid (Primus cellular service). I know from my own experience that no matter how good the electronics may be, there are still times when you need a knowledgable human to solve problems.

WIMAX is a relatively new technology, and if Primus (or anyone else) is planning roll it out on a large scale it is likely critical that new users have solid support to get them though the setup process.

Since the initial hickups the response from the WIMAX support has not been too bad. Sure I would prefer that it was quicker, but I’m willing to accept that this is a trial phase. I’d like it if Primus could be a little more pro-active during outages, perhaps bulk mailing trial users to let them know what’s happening, and perhaps they’ll get that organized in coming weeks.

So all in all, I’m not complaining too much.

Regular readers will recall that my Primus WIMAX service finally started working on November 8. All went well til yesterday, 12 days later, when I arrived home to find that the signal had disappeared. Since then it has reappeared briefly a couple of times, but overall the WIMAX is dead.

I e-mailed Primus support at 6:11 pm. This time they responded at 10:32 that evening, a relatively (for Primus) speedy response time of four hours.

We’re aware of the problems you’ve been experiencing with the WiMAX connection regarding the fluctuation. We are in the midst of further investigating and testing the network due to those issues. When we have more information we’ll let you know. Thanks for the feedback.

Fourteen hours later the signal is still lost, with no explanation.

When it was working I was having great problems with lagging connections. Common pages like Facebook or The Register would take up to ten seconds to load. Often part of the page would load, but some elements, especially externally supplied information like banner ads would simply not appear, or would stop the page load entirely. Doubleclick.net seems to have the biggest problem, often stopping dead in its tracks.

Slashdot seems worst site, and sometime simply refuses to load, or needs to be refreshed repeatedly. E-mail downloads will stall unpredictably, and again sometimes need to be canceled and re-initiated.

I don’t know where these problems are coming from, whether they are directly related to WIMAX or just the Primus servers, but they are irritating.

FOLLOWUP: 4:17 pm, about 24 hours later, the connection seems to have returned.

FOLLOWUP: 4:18 pm. I was wrong. The modem will now connect with a strong signal, but drop it after a second or two. I have e-mailed Primus support.

FOLLOWUP: 6:30 pm – WIMAX Seems to be back.

FOLLOWUP: 7:00 pm – Sigh… I was wrong.

The WIMAX service has settled in and worked consistently for a few days now. There are really only two items of note.

The first is that the ZyXEL MAX-210M1 WIMAX Modem interferes with off-air TV reception, specifically the lower VHF channels. Yes, unbelievably I do not have cable television and use rabbit ears.

Specifically CBC on channel 5 is unwatchable, and CTV on channel 9 is a sometime thing. UHF channels seem less impaired. I’ll relocate the modem today and see if that solves it.

The second issue, and this is directly related to the WIMAX, is the lag in loading web pages. First thing in the morning I check Slashdot, Facebook, this blog, and CBC. Each of them can take upwards of ten seconds to load. A lot of the time it seems that it’s not the actual site that lagging, but feeder sites like doubleclick or other ad providers. Slashdot in particular has all sorts of odd problems where ads will just not appear, or on one occasion when none of the graphic elements appeared at all.

What this looks like is that somewhere in the chain there is a cache that has to be filled for content to flow smoothly. I’m guessing that if someone has already visited a site it should load quickly. If not then you wait. I can’t think that the trip from the WIMAX access point to here – less than a kilometre – would add that much lag, although the send from the modem backwards could be problematic.

(Example: I just clicked “Save and Continue Editing” in WordPress, and instead of this updating I was told that the web page couldn’t be found)

Whew. I’m not sure just what I finally did, but I managed to convince the Netgear router to let me configure it. Seriously, I tried every combination of rebooting and resetting that thing that I could think of, and finally for no reason it just worked again.

I also think that I tracked down one specific issue: both the Netgear Router and the Zyxel WIMAX modem default to an IP address of 198.162.1.1. I changed the router address to 198.162.2.1 and everything seems happy.

So I now have an older PC on-line, and a G4 Mac Powerbook. Time to see how things go.

This morning the Primus tech guy showed up at 10 AM to check my set up. Needless to say, the modem had kicked in about ten minutes earlier and was going fine by the time he arrived. He looked at the five green signal lights, told me that other users in this area had been having problems too, and left.

I have spent too much time today trying to set up a new-to-me Netgear WGR614v6 router, a box which is unlike any that I have seen. This router forces you into a set-up Wizard that will only work if you’re connected to the Internet. If that doesn’t work you need to track down some rather non-intuitive instructions and follow them to the letter to access the manual set-up pages. None of this has worked for me yet, so I’m connected to the modem with a direct ethernet connection.

What I’m finding is that generally the connection feels like DSL, except for the first time that you connect to specific site. That first connection seems to hang for a few seconds after which everything works fine.

My guess is that Primus is pre-caching pages at their end in some fashion, and that this is contributing the delay. At one point pages that included ads from doubleclick.net and the like displayed error pages where the ads should have been. This is not unnecessarily a big problem, but is worth monitoring as we go ahead.

After waiting a week with no response, I e-mailed every Primus contact that I had once again. Finally on Tuesday I heard back from our primary contact for the WIMAX Trials telling me that they were having “an issue with the authentication server.” I then had a call and e-mail from Primus support early yesterday evening.

I arrived home that evening to find the modem lit up like a Christmas tree, five full signal LEDs clear and bright, and solid WIMAX signal.

This morning though the signal began to drop out occasionally, then more frequently, then entirely but for the occasional connection.

The latest word is that Primus will send out a tech to measure signal strength from my location, that to be booked in the next 24 hours.

When it was working the WIMAX seemed indistinguishable from DSL. Although I sensed some latency that was likely my imagination, or just normal network lag. Really the connection seemed fine and steady until it stopped working.

The ZyXel modem seems to have an issue, and occasionally reboots for no apparent reason. The North American power adapter showed up yesterday as well, replacing the European plug which had been shipped with the modem.

UPDATE! Primus just sent me a third AC adapter. You’ll recall that the modem came with a European adapter (although dual voltage), which was replaced by a North American adapter eight days later. Today’s mail delivered yet another adapter, which would have been handy, except that once again it has those big European prongs!