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Network Performance

I realize this post assumes more technical knowledge than many of my readers possess. In the pre-COVID-19 era, my grandson Chris and I held free consultation sessions at the Ferndale Public Library to help folks over technical hurdles. We’re working with the Whatcom County Library System to resume these sessions online. I’m in several COVID-19 hyper-vulnerable categories and do not plan to resume in-person sessions until the viral landscape changes significantly, but Chris and I miss our library sessions and hope to get something going online soon.

An image in a Zoom meeting pixilates into a messy checkerboard of colored squares. Or the screen freezes. Or a voice sounds like a chef is chopping it up and throwing it on a sizzling griddle.

These, and a hundred variations, are network performance issues, which, from an engineering standpoint, can be reduced, but never eliminated.

You may find it hard to believe, but these visual and audio burps demonstrate the computer network’s reliability. The web we experience today is an engineering miracle that has transformed a ramshackle collection of unreliable and inconsistently implemented subnetworks into a reliable global service. Unlike a traditional phone connection, which is essentially an unbroken wire from one user to another that either succeeds or breaks, computer network connections steer their own path like a car on a cross-country drive taking detours and switching highways, slowing down and speeding up as conditions change, but never stopping. Instead of failing, the network recovers and corrects itself with these gyrations.

Great. Wonderful. But we all want the broken images and garbled sound to go away.

Here are some fixes. Most are not expensive. 

Network speed check

Start with a speed check. There are many free speed checkers available. Google “free network speed check” and take your pick. Follow the simple instructions (press GO.) In half a minute or so, you’ll get a download and upload rate in MBPS (MegaBytes Per Second). You may also get a Ping time in milliseconds, (ms), but it’s the upload and download rates you want. Most aggravating problems are with downloads. An upload of a large file like a video that takes five minutes is not nearly as painful as a garbled movie image or a messed-up Zoom meeting, which are almost always due to slow downloads.

Note, however, a full-on home office may need fast uploads. Businesses pay extra for fast uploads. If you find yourself losing valuable time waiting for files to upload, a business network connection will cost, but it should solve the problem. Premium residential service probably won’t help.

We have comparatively good network service from Comcast here in Ferndale. That’s because the Comcast infrastructure here is fairly new and reliable. Other areas may differ. At the moment at our house, downloads are about 400 MBPS, upload 20 MBPS. This is good for residential service. Disregard theoretical 1000 MBPS promises. Theory is wonderful, but practice is what you get for your money.

Your internet service provider

If you have speeds substantially below ours, call your internet service provider. (Comcast, Frontier, etc.) Something may be wrong that they can easily fix with a reset or reconfiguration. At worst, they will try to sell you premium service. Ask for a free upgrade. You might get one. For internet service providers, losing a customer is often a greater loss than a free upgrade. Internet service providers often comp and discount freely to avoid completely losing your monthly payment. When 5G cellular comes online your negotiating position is likely to get even stronger.

Secrets

Now, I’ll let you in on a few secrets. Your real performance may depend more on your home network than your internet service provider. If you have a typical broadband connection, you have a modem and router attached to a television or telephone cable coming into your house. The modem separates the computer network signal from the incoming signals and converts it to the Ethernet signal used by your computing devices. The router distributes Ethernet signals to your devices. Almost all residential routers emit radio waves (Wi-Fi) that link the router to your computers, but they also have sockets (typically four) that you can use for cabled connections. These days, modems and routers are usually combined into a single device.

Modem-routers

If your modem-router is old, you might need a new one. In the computer world, newer means faster. If your modem- router is more than five years old, a replacement will almost certainly improve your performance. I use 18 months as a rule of thumb for replacement. If you got your modem-router from your internet service provider, ask for a free upgrade. They want you as a customer.

Wisdom is that you can get a better deal by purchasing your own modem-router, but the internet service providers prefer to support their own equipment and they will fight you on it. You have a legal right to use your own equipment, but, in my experience, the providers are more likely to offer a free modem-router than cease trying to charge you for using your own.

Upgrading the software on your modem-router may help performance and some serious security issues with home modem-routers have been corrected recently with software upgrades. If you can, it’s safer to opt-in on automatic upgrades.

Ethernet cables vs. Wi-Fi

When it’s possible, I use an Ethernet cable rather than a wireless connection to devices. On our home network, a cabled Ethernet connection is ten times faster than a Wi-Fi connection. Cables are their own form of torture, but they perform better.

Our house, which is only two years old, was wired with CAT6 ethernet cables but not set up to use them. When we moved in, my grandson Christopher and I worked on our inhouse cabling. Now, we can plug into wired Ethernet anywhere in the house we want. There are lots of YouTube tutorials on Ethernet home wiring if you have the DIY bent. A few special tools are almost a necessity for DIY, but you can also have the wiring done for you. If the wires are already in the walls, a pro can finish the job in a few hours. Typically, you can add an Ethernet socket to all your television cable outlets.

If you want more connections than the usual four on the router, get an unmanaged Ethernet switch, which will branch a single socket to multiple sockets. Avoid “hubs.” They also multiplex Ethernet connections and are sometimes cheap, but they are old and slow technology. Managed switches are for network engineers, not residences.

In my office I have an unmanaged five-port switch I bought from Amazon for a little over ten dollars. Connected to a single Ethernet wall socket, the switch yields four fast network connections.

If your house is not wired for Ethernet and you don’t want to spend much, you can buy premade Ethernet cables to run on the floor like extension cords from your modem-router. Shop around for cables. Prices vary. Avoid trip hazards, be neat, and don’t use cables that are longer than needed. If you coil the excess, strange interference patterns can cause erratic performance. Use switches to provide more fast remote connections than the four on the router.

Wi-Fi

Typically, you still need Wi-Fi for tablets and phones, although I sometimes use a USB-Ethernet cable adapter with my Surface tablets.

There are some tricks you can try with wireless when you have performance issues. The cheapest and easiest is to move around. Wi-Fi signals pass through most walls, but metal objects, like a water heater or other appliances can slow a signal down. High current appliances like starting air conditioners or furnaces also affect radio signals, which can explain fluctuating performance. Try to locate your modem-router centrally and close to the areas where network performance matters most.

If a Wi-Fi signal is unreliable in the perfect spot for your home office, don’t despair. Current standard Wi-Fi uses two channels: 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz. The 5 GHz channel is faster, but it does not penetrate walls well and it has a shorter range than the older 2.4 GHz channel. Routers today default to 5 GHz and reserve 2.4 GHz channel for old devices that can’t access the 5 GHz channel. If your perfect spot is in a remote corner, you may get better performance if you configure your router to use the 2.4 GHz channel for the device you use in your perfect spot even if it will work on 5 GHz.

If your home network covers a large area, you may want to look into a “mesh” system that emits Wi-Fi signals from more than one source. These are a more effective version of the Wi-Fi repeaters that were touted as range extenders a few years ago.

Tri-band routers have two 5 GHz channels and one 2.4 GHz channel. The router distributes 5 GHz devices over the two fast channels. Decreased congestion on the fast channels improves performance. If your biggest problem is distance, go with a mesh. If you have a ton of contending devices, get a tri-band.

Don’t just shrug your shoulders when you have network performance issues. You have a good chance of improving your experience.

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Masks For a Hard-Headed Dutchman

In my carpenter days, I thought I was a hard-headed Dutchman who feared nothing. My mother’s family is Lynden Dutch from the Netherlands. Outside Whatcom County, a Dutchman is usually a person of German descent. My father’s family is from Prussia, home to the hardest headed Germans. Both families were stubborn dairy farmers accustomed to hard work and bad weather. They formed their own opinions and stuck to them. I was turned out from a tough and hard-headed Dutchman mold.

Back in the late 70s, I was a carpenter. Sometimes I got orders to wear a mask, but I avoided them whenever I could, although I knew full well that masks were self-protection and for my benefit.

I didn’t need any stinking masks. I knew I was supposed to wear a carbon filter when I worked with hot solvents like acetone and lacquer thinner, but I was young and tough. Once, I had a job installing a Formica bathtub surround. I’ve installed acres of Formica laminate and my process was down pat. Paint the wall and the Formica with contact cement and let it dry, releasing clouds of solvent. Use thin strips of waste to separate the laminate from the wall until the surround was positioned perfectly, then pull the strips and roll the laminate down tight. I applied the cement, waited, then began to wrestle the surround into place, inhaling solvent fumes. My head started to swim, and brown clouds rushed in from the sides. I stumbled, opened a window, and turned on the exhaust fan as my vision constricted to a foggy tunnel. Fortunately, fresh air cleared my head and I was able to finish the installation.

At the time, I was proud of myself. I came through a tough spot and delivered a good job. Forty years later, I have a different opinion. I was a stupid kid who was lucky to have survived. The only good thing I can say is that I endangered myself, no one else.

In those days, I was also not as careful as I should have been around asbestos, which was all over construction sites back then. Not too long ago I heard of another tough Dutchman, a skilled craftsman whom I admired. He was my foreman on a few jobs. He died of asbestosis, a fatal lung disease caused by asbestos dust. Many of the carpenters I knew from those days are dead now, not all of them from lung diseases, but a fair number. My lungs are still good, but that’s luck, not being tough. I should have been more careful.

Forty years later, I still have some of that hard-headed Dutchman attitude. Well, so what? We tough Dutchmen make our decisions and don’t complain about the consequences. That’s what tough means to me. Back in the day, I acted like a first responder who doesn’t take time to grab protective gear. Yeah. A foolish hero. I made bad decisions but I was the one I placed in danger.

Today is different. The kind of masks that most of us are requested to wear now do not protect the wearer, at least not directly. To start with, since COVID-19 is infectious before its victims have symptoms, anyone in an area where COVID-19 is active, unless they have tested negative for the virus in the last three days, can transmit the disease without knowing it. Some people spread the virus without ever getting sick. That’s why public health officials in some places ask everyone to wear masks.

Water droplets laden with virus are the villains. Breathing, talking, singing, coughing, and sneezing all project droplets into the air. These droplets break up and evaporate into even finer particles called aerosols that hold the virus and float up to six feet before most have fallen to the ground. In cold air, they float longer. The aerosols are so fine, they are inhaled right through a cloth mask. Breathe in enough of these minute virus-carrying packets and you are infected with COVID-19. A cloth mask blocks the droplets and prevents tiny aerosols from forming. Healthcare personnel and first responders, who must get close to infected victims, don special masks that stop the aerosols, but the cloth masks worn by the rest of us only keep the droplets in, which impedes the spread of the virus, but does not protect the wearer from aerosols coming from disease victims. People wearing masks protect each other. Remove your mask and you threaten your neighbor.

If enough people wear cloth masks, and follow other practices like social distancing, frequent hand washing, and surface disinfection, the spread of the virus will slow, and we will all be safer and the daily death toll will go down.

Heroes sacrifice themselves for others; selfish wretches hurt others for their own convenience.

Where does that leave a hard-headed Dutchman who wants to own his fate? He makes his choice based on what he has learned.

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Whatcom County’s Towering Monuments

Today, silos in Whatcom County stand empty, towering monuments to old practices. Dairy farmers still feed silage, but their modern equipment stores it without a fuss in the giant white plastic wrapped marshmallows stacked in fields and barnyards.

This afternoon, I looked into one of my mother’s diaries and discovered that 54 years ago, instead of fretting over COVID-19 like everyone seems to be doing today, my dad was getting ready to fill the silo with grass silage.

The silo on the farm, built by Art Weden in the 40s

Some farm events, like chicken catching and hog butchering, were almost celebrations; family, friends, and neighbors gathering to enjoy working together. Not silo filling. It meant days of hard heavy work amid howling equipment that shook the ground and pounded ringing ears. During silo filling, the men were on edge, worried about breakdowns and foul weather, trying not to dwell on the how the day could go wrong.

Farming is still a dangerous profession, but in the 50s and 60s, when farmers gathered at the old Hilltop on the Guide Meridian for a cup of coffee on a rainy afternoon, talk began with pleasant banter about milk prices, corn versus grass silage, and the merits of the fresh heifers on the block at the Everson auction. But as often as not, at some point, the conversation took a sober twist toward overturned tractors, hands mangled in spinning power take-off shafts, and falls that broke arms and legs.

Grandpa and grandma several years before I was born.

In the early 50s, my dad went together with three other dairy farmers in the North Bellingham-Laurel area to buy silo-filling equipment: a field chopper and a blower. The machines were expensive, and they were used only for a few weeks each year. By combining their resources, Dad and the others were able to buy equipment they couldn’t afford individually. There was no contract or legal agreement. They just decided to pool their money and work together. I doubt that they even bothered to shake hands on it.

Each farmer supplied and outfitted their own wagon for hauling fresh-cut silage. Now days, silage is hauled on trucks or wrapped in plastic in the field, but in the 50s and 60s, farmers used hay wagons to move chopped grass to their silos. The wagons were outfitted with wooden sides and a sliding partition that was drawn by cables to pull silage to the back of the wagon where it was unloaded. Men with forks pulled the silage from the wagon to a conveyor attached to the blower. I was proud and excited the first time Dad handed me a fork and told me to start pulling grass off the wagons. The silage was blown straight up forty or more feet to the top of the silo where the heavy chopped grass or corn made a hairpin turn and was blown forcefully into a flexible distributor pipe that dangled down to the level of the fodder already in the silo.

The largest and most powerful tractor pulled the field chopper. The howl of the chopper was loud enough to be heard from the silo, even when the machine was a half mile away. The chopper cut waist high grass, slashed it into one-inch lengths, and blew it into a silage wagon that trailed behind. When a wagon was full, another tractor dropped off an empty wagon and towed the full wagon to the silo. Driving the tractors hauling wagons between the field and blower was a prime job on a silage crew.

The blower fan was spun by a twenty-foot flat belt driven by a pulley mounted on a stationary tractor running with the throttle wide open. Log chains were attached to the tractor and twisted with a peavey to keep the belt tight and stable. The roar of the blower and tractor engine traveled for miles. The ground thumped and shook when hundredweight wads of silage hit the blower fan blades and were thrown up and over the high wall of the silo.

Inside the silo tower, a half dozen men and boys directed the distributor pipe and walked in a circle around the perimeter, leveling the chopped grass, and tramping down air pockets that would spoil the silage. Wisdom was that the center would take care of itself, but the edges, especially around the unloading doors, needed attention. Tramping silage was work, perhaps not as strenuous as pulling the grass off the wagons, but fresh silage is spongy. Every direction is up hill. Leveling the silage required hard fork work, especially when the silage was wet. The silos had to be filled quickly while the milk-producing protein content of the fodder was at its prime; the soaking squalls that come in off the Salish Sea in May, like we had last week in Ferndale, were no excuse to let up, despite the slackers’ grumbles.

As the silo filled, the work got harder as sections of distributor pipe were removed and lowered to the ground. As each section disappeared, the green cascade of blown grass became more difficult to direct and the incoming silage had to be forked from the center as fast as the ground crew pulled it off the wagon. The men on the forks began to sweat.

About ten feet from the top, the pace became feverish. The distributor pipe was so short it was nearly useless. If the silage was not moved fast enough, the flow from the blower pipe might be restricted for an instant and the pipe would back up and clog. If the crew feeding the blower did not kill the engine quickly, the roaring tractor would pack the pipe solid with silage. When the silage was on the dry side, a nimble and lucky crew could clear the pipe by disconnecting it at the blower and shaking the clog loose. But in pouring rain, the wet silage would wedge in tight and the blower pipe had to be lowered on a cable and taken apart to dig out the clog.

Raising the pipe with a cable and tractor when setting up was a tense and tricky job. But when the pipe was crammed with heavy silage and the yard around the silo was churned into a slick mud hole by rain and wagon traffic, lowering the blower pipe was risky.

One sloppy wet year, the tractor on the cable lowering a jammed pipe lost traction in the mud and pipe came crashing down and crumpled. No one was badly injured, but it was close. When the pipe hit the ground, it jacked around out of control and could have broken limbs, cracked skulls, and crushed chests. The man guiding the end of the pipe got a nasty gash in his hand and my mother had to rush him in our car to the emergency room at the county hospital on the corner of Northwest and Smith. They sewed up his wound and he returned to work. One of the other farmers hurried off in a truck to the Allis-Chalmers dealer on the Guide for a replacement section of blower pipe while my dad and the rest of the crew disassembled the mess in pouring rain and cleared out the undamaged sections.

The clog occurred shortly after noon dinner and the pipe was back up and operating in time to get in a few more loads before quitting time at five.

COVID-19 is horrible, life has always been hard, but working the farm was heroic in ways it has taken me a long time to recognize.