I-Wireless aircards can’t reach Wikipedia
{See comments for an update}
GPRS carrier I-Wireless (a T-Mobile affiliate) stopped providing routes to Wikipedia.org sometime in the last few weeks. Other wired & wireless carriers know the data path to Wikipedia’s servers.
I swear — the customer service rep had never heard of Wikipedia…
I let it go for weeks because I can read Wiki pages via Google’s cache. Tonight, though, I finally got fed up. “Didn’t anyone else notice this problem?” I asked myself. So I sat down to do some research on the problem.
It’s not a DNS issue: I can resolve an IP address for both www.Wikipedia.org and en.Wikipedia.org. I simply can’t traceroute to a Wikipedia IP address, nor can I ping it (obviously). A bit of research leads me to suspect a misconfigured ACL on one of two routers, either 208.87.33.151 or 10.98.0.165.
I called I-Wireless to report it. The young female customer support rep insisted at first that Wikipedia.org is to blame. Now, I often struggle to maintain my composure when a service rep who didn’t do an ounce of research into the problem contradicts what I’m looking at right there on my screen. But this girl sounded pretty so, yeah, I maintained my composure.
I drilled her a bit on knowledge. Among other things, I discovered she’s never heard of Wikipedia. Good grief — am I the only Iowa resident who uses one of the world’s most popular websites?
She didn’t know what a traceroute is, either. Eventually she revealed that she’s only trained to help people configure their Internet aircards. Customer service ends when you can reach www.iwireless.com. “Fair enough,” I thought. I need to ratchet up to Tier 2.
I asked if she’d file a tech service request. She gladly agreed to do so … but I didn’t hear any keyboard activity on her end, so I’m not going to hold my breath.
Here I sit in my RV, unable to surf to Wikipedia from my I-Wireless aircard. Bummer.
Personal | 27 August 2009 |
By Rob Rosenberger
, 27 August 2009 @ 9:22 pm
My I-Wireless aircard now routes to Wikipedia.org. This means two things. First, it means the customer service rep DID submit a trouble ticket up the chain. Second, we can safely infer the problem was on their end.
I’m still scratching my head over the whole “am I the only aircard user in IOwa who surfs to Wikipedia?” thing…