In Irene's wake: DSL chaos

Sunday afternoon, as Hurricane Irene departed and power came back on in Southwestern New Hampshire, my DSL service didn't.

That is to say, the modem came back online and the "Internet" connection light turned green. All seemed well, at first. But none of my computers could access the Internet. Instead, each machine displayed page load errors.

After a few minutes of rebooting everything and checking connections, the page load error gave way to a FairPoint Broadband Service Web page stating that "...we are improving the security of your broadband connection. As such, you have been redirected to the FairPoint Communications broadband service page to install a security update."

Really? This is one hell of a time to decide to update network security, I thought. My annoyance only increased when I realized that FairPoint may've provided a link to download the security update software, but they were not going to make the process of accessing that software easy.

"Your Web browser (Firefox) and Operating System (Mac) are not compatible with the DSL Security improvement process...please re-open this page on a Windows XP, Vista or Windows 7 PC using Internet Explorer," the message continued.

Bully for me, I have two Macs in the office. Time to call technical support? Nope, sorry. Both of my phone lines use Vonage, a VoIP service that relies on a working DSL modem for dial tone. Cell service at the house was sketchy at best -- if I could even get through to technical support during a hurricane.

Fortunately, I had an old Windows XP machine lying in the corner. So I pulled it out, booted up (ever notice how long the Rip Van Winkle wakeup process takes on an XP machine that's been sitting in a corner for six months?), and downloaded and ran the update program. The update process ran smoothly, thank God, and everything came up just fine. Whew!

So what happened?

The power surges and sags that preceded the outage had reset the modem back to its defaults. FairPoint detected that default status and responded by asking the user to download and run its basic installation software. What I downloaded is exactly the same software that FairPoint's technician used when setting up my DSL a few months ago. But FairPoint's Web page called it a "security update" that needed to be run before I could continue to use the service. What gives?

A technician explained: About eight months ago, FairPoint updated its installation software to improve security and created a Web page message to direct users to the update. It was a security update then. Now apparently it's just the new default configuration utility for DSL modems that need to be set up to access FairPoint's DSL service. The message just never changed.

So how about changing the message? And while you're at it, why not consider supporting a browser other than Internet Explorer?

Robert L. Mitchell is a national correspondent for Computerworld. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/rmitch, or e-mail him at rmitchell@computerworld.com >.