When new products first ship to early adopters, some growing pains are common. I’m sure that the Bird Buddy team will iron out the wrinkles as they start to see how the product performs in the real world. I also suspect that they’ll be a bit overwhelmed responding to help requests in the initial weeks and months.

If, like me, you are trying to connect your bird feeder to an Eero mesh wifi system you may have experienced some challenges. Your Eero network may simply not show up in the list of networks available during setup. The Bird Buddy support team was a little quick to suggest that this just won’t work and to return the unit, but instead I put on my nerd hat to dig a little deeper. Rest assured that the Bird Buddy does work with Eero Mesh Wifi, you’ll just need to tweak one key setting.

WPA3 Encryption

Pretty much all wifi signals are encrypted for security. As technology progresses forward, the encryption standards improve as well. The latest encryption standard is called WPA3, which is supported by modern wifi systems like Eero. Although this standard has been around since 2018, not all devices support it well. It turns out that the Bird Buddy is one of those devices.

Here’s how to disable that setting in Eero:

1. Tap on the Discover tab at the bottom of the Eero app
2. Tap on Eero Labs
   
3. Tap on WPA3 and ensure the slider is in the off position
   

Once you disable WPA3, restart the Bird Buddy in-app pairing flow and your network should now show up in the list of available options. I have submitted this information to the Bird Buddy support team, hopefully it can be addressed in a future firmware update.

Additional Information

How do I find my Bird Buddy in the Eero app?
The Bird Buddy shows up in the Eero app as “Espressif” which is the name of the wifi chip maker that is inside the bird house. You can change the name to Bird Buddy, and set the type to Pet Device so that it shows up more clearly in the app.

Will Bird Buddy always connect to the closest Eero?
In my testing, the Bird Buddy tries to stay connected to the Eero node where you initially set it up. This may mean that when you relocate to your final location, it reports a low signal strength if it is connected to a node on the other side of your home. To test whether this was a hard link to the node where it was initially set up, I actually unplugged that node to see what happened. Bird Buddy then switched to the closest Eero, which tells me that it can theoretically reconnect to the strongest node. Still, my recommendation is to perform the initial setup with the Bird Buddy in its ultimate location to ensure it connects to the Eero node with the strongest signal.

Do I need to disable 5GHz?
You may be prompted by support documentation to disable 5GHz. In my testing, this is not necessary and the Eero mesh network will still be detected. Eero uses 2.4 GHz, 5 GHz, and 6 GHz channels to maximize speed and coverage. There is a troubleshooting mode that will enable 2.4GHz Only for 15 minutes to help connecting older devices, but it should not be necessary with Bird Buddy.

What firmware versions did you test with?
I am currently testing with the following hardware and firmware versions.

• Bird Buddy firmware 0.9.37
• Eero 5 “Cupcake” and Eero 5 Pro with firmware 6.12.1-54

Will this be fixed in future versions?
I have reported the issue to Bird Buddy support and recommended that they escalate it to the engineering team. My guess is that this can be fixed in firmware, but I’m not a firmware engineer so that will be entirely up to the Bird Buddy team to determine.

Quick Answer: They’re about the same.

• One Tablespoon of Morton’s Kosher Salt weighs 17g, while One Tablespoon of Windsor Kosher Salt weighs 18g
• One Quarter-Cup of Morton’s Kosher Salt weighs 71g, while One Quarter-Cup of Windsor Kosher Salt weighs 73g

Long Answer: I like to experiment with food, which means I subject my family to plenty of “let’s try this” recipes that I come across. The reviews almost always come back as “good but too salty”, which made me wonder if there is a fundamental difference between the type of salt used in the recipes or if my family just has developed a low-salt preference.

Most recipes I’ve found tend to use Morton’s Kosher salt, which is a very common brand in the US but not readily available in my home country of Canada. Some recipes mention a difference between measurements of Morton’s salt and Diamond Crystal salt, which was my first clue that the type of salt could be an issue. Measurements like tablespoons or cups are so imprecise compared to weight, so I decided to dust off my Science Degree to find out what is really up with my salt. Hey, it’s a pandemic and I’m bored… don’t judge!

Today’s experiment will weigh equal volumes of the two brands to determine if, in fact, there is a difference that could impact their use in recipes.

I procured a bottle of Morton’s Kosher Salt on a recent business trip to the US for this experiment, to compare against the box of Windsor Kosher Salt that is always in my pantry.

Comparison: One Quarter Cup of Salt

Comparison: One Tablespoon of Kosher Salt

Comparison: Kosher Salt Texture

I found the textures of the two brands similar, with a mixture of large and some smaller grains of salt. The Windsor salt contained more small grains, which I attempted to capture in the photos below.

Conclusion

I have reached two conclusions from this experiment.

1. I desperately need this pandemic to end so that I can get out of the house instead of spending my Saturday weighing salt.
2. While Windsor Kosher Salt has slightly more salt mass by volume than Morton’s Kosher Salt, it’s probably not enough to impact flavour. My family just prefers low-salt foods so I’ll need to adjust future recipes from the US to use less salt.

Ingredients:

• For the Soup:
  • 1 Yellow Onion, diced
  • 2 Carrots, diced
  • 4 Celery Stalks, diced
  • 1 Cup cooked chicken, chopped into 1/2” pieces
  • 1 tsp table salt or bouillon cube
  • 1/2 tsp ground black pepper
  • 1 tsp Italian Seasoning
  • 2 cups egg noodles
  • 8 cups water
• For the Flavour Bomb
  • Carcass of one roasted chicken, or equivalent leftover chicken pieces. The photos below are actually from four roasted bone-in chicken breasts
  • Scraps from all the vegetables you prepared (carrot peels, celery ends, onion ends and skins)
  • 2 bay leaves

Instructions:

1. Dump all of the soup ingredients directly into the Instant Pot: roughly chopped onion, carrots, celery, chicken, salt, pepper, Italian seasoning, egg noodles, water.
2. Place your vegetable scraps, chicken carcass, and bay leaves on the cheesecloth.
3. Fold over the cheesecloth to make the “flavour bomb” bundle. I find it easiest to roll it up like a burrito, then grab the ends and twist to seal the ends, then tie the ends together (see photo).
4. Add the cheesecloth flavour bomb to the instant pot
5. Pressure cook on high for 10 minutes
6. Quick release and remove the cheesecloth flavour bomb from the pot, it can now be disposed of as compost
7. Adjust seasoning on the soup (a lot depends on how much seasoning the chicken already had on it, you may need to add salt or pepper to your preference)

However if you’re looking to squeeze every last drop of performance out of your internet connection there are a few things you might want to tweak.

Let’s set the stage a little by explaining how your home Internet connection works.  In the diagram below, the blue public internet connects everything to everything.  If you connect your computer directly to the blue network, you’ll have hundreds of hackers trying to steal your stuff within minutes.  It’s the wild west, for that reason and other practical reasons like sharing a single connection we use a router to set up a private network for your home. That router has some smarts to it that will only let stuff through that you specifically request.  A few years ago you would get a modem from your Internet Provider to connect you to the blue public network, and buy a separate wifi router to create your yellow private network.  Nowadays, the modem from your Internet Provider probably includes a router and wifi so that yellow “Cogeco Private Network” is set up for you automatically.  When you plug in a new mesh wifi system it sets up another router and another completely separate network, which is in green below.  For the most part the routers are smart enough to figure this all out, but there are some more advanced use cases when that “network within a network within a network” can cause problems.  Have you seen the movie Inception?  Multiple layers of reality can get confusing real quick.

Two Common Mistakes That Can Ruin Your Wifi

When setting up a mesh network, it’s important to remember that you are setting up a completely new network.  Devices on that new network (green) will be able to seamlessly and quickly communicate with each other, but they cannot communicate with anything on your old network (yellow).  At best you might end up with a printer that can’t talk to your computer, at worst you might create a loop that brings down the entire network.

Mistake #1 – Too Many Wires to the Modem
To ensure that you have a nice, clean network always ensure that you have one and only one ethernet cable connecting from your modem to the first mesh router.  That puts the mesh router in charge and lets it act as traffic cop to everything else in your house.  If you need to connect additional devices using an ethernet cable, plug them into the mesh router.  If you don’t have enough ports on the mesh router, buy yourself a cheap gigabit switch and connect that to your mesh router to split the network port into multiple ports.  

Mistake #2 – Shared Wifi Names
You also want to make sure that you give your new mesh network a unique name (also called the SSID) so that your devices don’t get confused and connect to the wrong network.  If your old network and new network have the same name, you’ll end up with devices that get very confused.  Think of it this way – if your address is 123 Fake Street and your neighbour puts up a new sign on their front lawn that also says 123 Fake Street, you’re going to miss a lot of packages that the delivery driver thinks were delivered just fine.  Same concept applies to your internet, when packages go missing things go sideways very quickly.  Make sure the two networks have different wifi names.

Three Tweaks to Improve Mesh

So you have things set up properly and have avoided the mistakes above. Next we’ll look into some things you might want to do to improve performance of gaming platforms and advanced server-like apps.

Tweak #1 – Disable Modem Wifi
Running two wifi networks at the same time isn’t that big of a problem, so long as they have unique names.  However the reality is that wifi has limited radio channels that it can use and those can get congested very easily.  When you go to connect to wifi on your phone or computer you’ll likely see multiple wifi names from your neighbors.  Each one of those is using up radio channels, less available channels means less speed which is probably the opposite of why you got the mesh in the first place.
Cogeco Customers: To permanently disable your cable modem’s wifi you’ll need to call Cogeco and ask them to turn it off, turning it off yourself will just reset once it checks in with Cogeco for the settings.

Tweak #2 – Set modem to Bridge Mode
Running two routers adds a lot of complexity, and introduces something called “Double NAT”.  Some gaming services will complain about this, and it could cause issues some of the automatic port-forwarding features of advanced apps.  The easiest way around this is to simply turn off the router that is included with your Internet Provider’s modem and let your mesh router take care of everything.  Referring back to the diagram, bridge mode shuts off the yellow network completely (no wifi, no MoCA) and connects all of the network jacks on the modem to the public internet.  Your mesh will run better for gaming and advanced apps when it doesn’t have to navigate multiple networks at once.
Cogeco Customers: To put your modem into bridge mode, you’ll need to call Cogeco and ask them to do that for you.

Tweak #3 – Enable IP Passthrough (if bridge mode not available)
There are some cases where your Internet Provider will not allow you to put the modem into bridge mode.  Usually this is because they are actually using that yellow private network to deliver additional services to you.  In the case of Cogeco, that yellow network actually gets transmitted over the coax cables in your house using a technology called MoCA to deliver TIVO services.  If you turn that off, your Tivo stops working which is probably a bad thing.  Instead your modem may have a feature called “IP Passthrough” which lets you keep the router enabled, but at the same time passes through a Public IP address to your mesh router.  It’s the best of both worlds, if your modem supports it.
Cogeco Customers: To turn on IP Passthrough you’ll need to log in to your modem and turn it on. Shaw has a good guide here on how to accomplish that with the Hitron modem, however the Cogeco default password is wait for it… “password” and not the serial number on the modem. If you have a different modem I recommend a google search to help you turn on IP Passthrough if that’s an option.

What is Pete’s Setup?

As always, I’ll finish with my setup so you get a feeling for how this all works in my house. I subscribe to Cogeco Gigabit internet, which is connected to a Hitron CODA-4589 modem that is in Bridge mode. One wire connects from my Hitron modem to my Eero “cupcake” router, and another wire connects from my Eero to a Netgear Gigabit switch which connects all the rest of my devices in the home.

Quick Summary: Don’t change internet provider, just change your DNS server.

The issue that plunged nearly half of Milton back to the pre-Internet era wasn’t actually an internet outage, it was a DNS outage. You shouldn’t have to care about DNS, but hey we’re all in lockdown with time to burn and once you understand how it works there’s actually some really cool things you can do to improve the internet for your family. Might as well learn something new today!

The Internet is surprisingly similar to the telephone system. Every computer has a numerical address, to connect to it you type that number into your computer and voila you’re connected. Do you remember the phone number of everyone you might want to call? Of course you don’t, instead there is a phone book published on a regular basis that allows you to look up a person’s name and find their phone number. On the Internet, that phone book is the Domain Name Service or DNS for short. It’s 2021 though, and just like nobody uses a phone book any more the whole process of looking up internet IP addresses is hidden and automated. On your web browser, you type in www.milton.ca and all of the number lookups are done for you automagically.

So What Happened with Cogeco?
When you connect to the internet, your modem asks the internet provider what “phone book” (DNS Server) to use. The vast majority of internet providers publish their own phone book and direct anything in your house using the internet to use their phone book. Generally that’s a good thing, keeping the phone book really close by means that every single time you go to a website it can look up those numbers really fast. However a DNS server is one of those things that can get easily overlooked by an internet provider because normally it “just works” and it’s not uncommon for DNS servers run by local internet providers to develop problems over time.

Umm, That Sounds Important
The modern internet depends on DNS working, and working well. Recognizing the importance of DNS and the reality that ISP-provided DNS sometimes isn’t well maintained, several companies also run their own servers with a focus on keeping it working 100% of the time. Basically they’re saying that they really want you to use a phone book that is always up to date and always works, so they try to make it as easy as possible to switch to their phone book. Google, Cloudflare, and OpenDNS are all popular free options.

Smarter Safer DNS
We now know that you need a DNS “phone book” to really use the internet, and you want that phone book to be reliable. However you can also make sure that phone book is safe. Would you rather give your kids a phone book with every illegal and potentially dangerous site on the internet, or give them a phone book that blocks those dangerous sites from your family? That safe phone book is exactly what several of these free DNS services offer, one good pre-configured service is FamilyShield from OpenDNS which I have personally used in the past.

My Recommendation
What happened this week with Cogeco could happen to any internet provider, and I would not recommend changing providers just because of this outage. There are lots of reasons why you might want to switch which I covered in my Internet Options in Milton article, but this isn’t one of them. Here’s that article. 

It’s worth the five minutes it will take you this weekend to change the DNS server on your router. The hardest part is figuring out how to log in to your particular modem or router to change the DNS from “automatic” to using one of these free public DNS servers.

Primary Recommendation: Change the DNS settings on your modem or router to use either Cloudflare or if you want more family security features OpenDNS. Once you set it up on your router, it will automatically update all of your devices as well so that’s where you should make the change ideally. Cloudflare has a really nice setup page with instructions and in some cases apps that will help you, here’s the website https://1.1.1.1/dns/

Secondary Recommendation: If you’re not comfortable making that change, just be ready in case it happens again. Frankly if it happened twice that’s a red flag for most of us techies that it could happen a third time as well. Print off this post or write down this internet address http://208.69.38.205. That will link you directly to a page at OpenDNS that will work *even if your DNS is broken* and walk you through how to fix it.

What does Pete use?
I like to end these posts with my setup because someone will always ask.  Personally I use a paid service called Eero Secure+ that was built in to my wifi mesh system, it includes a DNS that allows me to easily set up security rules for each person in my household. It was cheap, easy, and blocks not only malware but also annoying ads.

Your home internet depends on three things that all need to work well together – Underground Wires, Internet Provider, and Home Wifi. If any one of those three is bad, you’ll hear about it from your household as “our internet sucks”.

#1 – Underground Wires

The wires buried under the ground coming into your house are the one thing you really have no control over, and the quality of those wires varies greatly from neighbourhood to neighbourhood. In Milton, the majority of the town has two wires coming into your home: copper from Bell and coax from Cogeco.

Bell Copper – The underground copper lines that Bell owns around Milton were built in different generations for very different purposes. In older neighbourhoods (let’s say pre-2000 housing boom) the copper was put in for voice, with long runs snaking throughout the neighbourhood connecting houses in a local loop. Due to the length and age of these older lines, they’re sometimes not great for high-speed internet which is why older neighbourhoods often complain about internet speeds and inconsistent Fibe TV reception. Some neighbourhoods are at the beginning of the loop and have no issues, and some (like mine) are at the end of the loop and get terrible service. If this is the case with your neighbourhood, you’re probably out of luck as fixing it would mean tearing up many kilometers of old wiring. In newer neighbourhoods (post-2000 housing boom), the copper was built with high-speed internet in mind and is generally pretty good.

Cogeco Coax – The underground coax lines that Cogeco owns around Milton also vary in age, but the coax cables were built to handle lots of channels and lots of data from day one. In general, the coax cable will be able to handle whatever service you purchase. The cabling here is also relatively easy to fix, so if there is an issue then generally Cogeco can tweak things in your neighbourhood to fix it. Rogers also has coax in some neighbourhoods, for the purposes of this article consider Rogers and Cogeco coax to be the same.

Fibre to the Home – In a small number of very new neighbourhoods, you may have fibre optic cable directly into your home. Lucky you! This is pretty much future-proof and literally runs at the speed of light, but as I’ll point out later you’re also limited in your options for the time being.

#2 – Your Internet Provider

Regardless of which underground wire you use, that wire has to connect to the Internet somewhere. The companies who own the wire (Bell, Cogeco, Rogers) obviously sell their own internet service. Benefits to going with one of them is that you can take advantage of bundles with TV and phone service, and if there are problems with the underground wiring it’s their own problem so they tend to treat it with a sense of urgency. However there are many complaints here on Milton related to customer service and pricing. In Canada, the companies that own the underground wire are required to rent it out to third-party internet access (TPIA) providers. Well, most of them are. If you have fibre to the home they are the only ones who are still allowed by the CRTC to operate as a monopoly. For everyone not on fibre, you get to pick your internet provider. Some of these providers are great, and some are terrible. In the terrible category are some that are super-cheap, but also have awful customer service and bad connections to the wider internet. The great ones have amazing service and fantastic connections to the wider internet. The trick is finding the sweet spot of great price and great service.

2023 Update – The last few years have been challenging for third-party providers due to some unfortunate government policy decisions. Several of them have either gone out of business or have been purchased by the bigger telcos. Because of that, my recommendations have changed significantly.

• Oxio – owned by Cogeco so you can expect similar service, but with lower prices and a free Eero mesh router
• Virgin – owned by Bell so you can expect similar service, but has lower prices
• Zedden IT – local advice and service from a highly recommended expert

#3 – Your Home Wifi

So you’ve got internet wired into your house now, your Internet Service Provider insists that it is blazing fast and you are getting exactly what you paid for. However, your family tells you that the “internet sucks” and you notice that some rooms are okay and some are terrible. Chances are you have bad wifi. Many internet providers include wifi with your service, but often the wifi they include is terrible. The “old way” of setting up wifi was to put a wifi router somewhere in the home, and hope your devices can connect to it. Think of it like putting a really loud speaker in your basement and hoping that the people upstairs can hear it. They probably can’t hear it, and even if you upgrade to a really really loud speaker you’re still just hearing muffled music through walls and probably annoying the neighbours with all the noise. No, what you need are smaller speakers placed throughout the house so that everyone can hear the music at a comfortable volume level. While I’ve simplified things wildly in this analogy that’s essentially what a modern mesh network does, it puts smaller wifi antennas throughout your home to ensure everyone has a good connection. With the number of devices in an average home and everyone learning or working from home at the same time, a mesh network is really a necessity these days.

Here are my mesh wifi recommendations:

• Amazon Eero – The set it and forget it option, at a fair price. An Eero 3-pack from amazon will cover most houses in Milton just fine and it auto-adjusts to any interference from your neighbours. There are a few different models available, it’s best choose the model based on the speed you pay for with your ISP.
  • Eero 6 or 6+ – 500 MB/s or less
  • Eero Pro 6 or 6E – 1 GB/s or less
• Google Nest Wifi – Consistently scores highly in tests, but also significantly more pricey than Eero.
  • I don’t personally own any of the Google devices, as of 2023 it makes sense to get a device that supports Wifi 6 which for Google would be the Nest Wifi Pro.

Rural Internet

There are several rural areas of Milton whose internet options are very limited. I’m happy to add more content to this section with experiences from others, as my own is fairly limited. I know that there are several rural fibre projects underway now so the options are increasing but highly dependant on your exact address. Two providers come to mind when thinking about rural internet in Milton as a whole:

• Standard Broadband – Milton-based wireless internet provider
• Starlink – Low-level satellite network from SpaceX

How to Test Your Internet

As you can imagine, testing your internet involves testing all of the things we discussed above. I wrote another article to help walk you through that, trying to keep things as simple as possible testing with a speed test app and letting you know what to do about it if you find a problem. Here’s the link to that article: https://pnear.wordpress.com/2020/12/29/internet-troubleshooting/

Summary

To get high-quality internet, you need to choose the best underground lines coming into your house, you need to pick a high-quality internet provider that runs on those lines, and you need good mesh wifi. If any one of those things are off it can lead to a bad experience for your household. Personally I live in Timberlea which is an older neighbourhood. My setup is this: Cogeco 1Gbps (got a good deal when I told them I was going to move to Oxio), with the Eero Pro 6 mesh system.

1. Test Wired Speed.  Plug a laptop directly into your modem and run a speed test at https://www.speedtest.net/, ideally while nobody else is using the internet in your home.  Write down both the download and upload speeds, they are both important.
   • If you are getting the speeds you pay for every time you test, then your underground wires and internet provider are probably fine.  Proceed to step 2 to test your wifi.
   • If your speeds are significantly lower than you are paying for, you likely have an issue with either your underground wires or your internet provider.  I would recommend testing again with a different ethernet cable, sometimes you can get a bad cable.
     • If the upload speeds are significantly lower than you pay for, this is a warning sign that there is something wrong with your underground wiring.  Either you are too far away from the node (DSL) or there is noise in your line (Cable).  
       What to do:  Call your Internet provider to complain and be sure to tell them the speeds you are getting when connected directly to the modem with an ethernet cable.  They’ll either offer to fix it, or tell you that the fine print says “up to that speed” and say there’s nothing they can do about it.  If they aren’t able to fix it, switch to the other underground wire (ie if you’re on DSL now, switch to Cable).
     • If the speeds are good right after you reset the modem, but get gradually worse a day or two after the reset then again you likely have bad underground wiring.  
       What to do:  Complain to your internet provider that speeds get slower over time after resetting the modem and try to get them to fix it, or switch to a provider who uses the other wire type coming into your home.
     • If your speeds get consistently worse after bad weather, it also points to an issue with your underground wiring.  For example, and old cable that has developed a hole in the insulation might get water in it after a heavy rain.  Or a wind storm could loosen the connector to your house.  
       What to do:  Complain to your internet provider and try to get them to fix it, or switch to the other wire type.
     • If your speeds get consistently worse at a particular time of day, it points to an issue with your Internet Provider’s connection to the wider internet.  This often happens when an internet provider sells internet to more people than they have capacity for (more common with the discount providers).  For example, everyone starts watching Netflix in the evening using up all the internet capacity and slowing everyone down in your area.  
       What to do:  Complain to your internet provider and let them know that wired internet speeds are always slow at a certain time of day.  If they dont’ fix it, change to a more reputable provider like Start.ca, Teksavvy, Bell, or Cogeco.
       
2. Test Wifi Speed at the Modem.  If your modem is getting the speeds you pay for when connected via an ethernet cable, then it’s time to test the wifi signal.  Start with testing right beside the modem, which is about as good as the wifi signal is going to get.  Using a phone, tablet, or laptop run a speed test at https://www.speedtest.net/ or even better by using the Ookla SpeedTest app on the newest mobile device you own.
   • If you are getting the speeds you pay for then great, your wifi likely doesn’t have any fundamental issues.  Proceed to Step 3 to test speeds in other rooms.
   • If you aren’t getting the speeds you pay for there are a few things that could be causing that, not all of them bad.
   • Real-world wifi speeds will always be slower that when you are connected with an ethernet cable.  The actual speed depends alot on how modern the modem/router and the device connected are and what type of wifi connection they can use.  In general, most devices you would be testing with should be capable of connecting around 150 Mbps.  If you’re able to get what you pay for or up to 150 Mbps, you are probably okay. Proceed to step 3 to test the wifi in other rooms.
   • If you are getting significant slowdowns, for example you pay for 100 Mbps and are only getting 5 Mbps on wifi, then you might have some radio interference in your home.  This could come from your neighbour’s wifi, or a microwave, or I’ve personally had issues with a bad LED bulb causing radio interference. 
     What to do:  If you are able to change the channel on your wifi router, give that a try (although most routers automatically select the least noisy channel so this probably isn’t going to fix it).  Try to isolate the interference through trial and error – test speed with the clothes dryer on, test with the microwave on, test with LED lights off.  If you’re not able to identify the source of the interference, I recommend switching to an intelligent wifi system that detects and works around interference.  Eero is one brand I know of that does this automatically.
   • If you are getting 150Mbps over wifi but were hoping to get more because you pay for it, you’ll likely need to upgrade your wifi to a newer technology.
     What to do:  Look for a new wifi router or even better a wifi mesh system that supports Wifi6.  This will by default support all of the newest technologies your devices can support. 
     
3. Test Wifi Speeds in Other Rooms.  If you are getting decent speeds near the modem, next you’ll want to test the speeds at other spots in the house.  Most likely you’ll find that the further away you get from your modem or router the worse the signal will get.  Using the same device you tested wifi speeds with near the modem, run a speed test in every room of the house.  Write down the upload and download speed in each room to give you a good picture of how your wifi is working throughout the home.  If you are getting significant slowdowns, that means your wifi signal isn’t able to penetrate the walls of your house effectively.  I would consider any downloads less that 10Mbps or uploads less than 1Mbps a potential problem.
   
   • If you have moderate slowdowns in some rooms, you might be able to fix it simply by moving your router.  
     What do to:  If you are able to move your modem or router to a more central location in your home that shortens the distance between the trouble spot and the router, you should do it.  This is the first piece of advice your internet provider will give you and it’s a good one if you can manage it.  It’s free for you and free for them, but realistically most people don’t have the outlets handy in a central spot and the bulky router doesn’t exactly look great sitting on your dining room table.
   • If there is just one room that has a problem, you need to get a stronger signal closer to that room.
     What to do:  Purchase a relatively cheap wifi extender to boost the signal to that room.  Here’s the trick though, you need to place the extender in a room that has good speeds (refer to your notes) and that is close enough to your dead spot.  It will probably be somewhere halfway between the main router and the dead spot.
   • If there are several rooms that have problematic speeds, you’ll need to get a mesh wifi system to provide even speeds across the entire home.
     What to do:  Review your notes to identify where you have problem spots, and plan to buy one mesh access point to cover each of those areas.  For your average detached home that will be one per level of your home.  In a mesh system, every access point you install adds range and speed for the devices in the home.  I highly recommend Eero and they provide a tool to help you pick the right model however I simply recommend you pick the model based on the speeds you pay for with your internet provider.
     • Up to 350 Mbps:  Eero 3-Pack (last year’s Wifi5 model)
     • Up to 500 Mbps:  Eero 6 3-Pack (this year’s Wifi6 model)
     • Up to 1 Gbps:  Eero Pro 6 3-Pack (this year’s Wifi6 model with extra radios)

To give you an idea of how this works in my house in the Timberlea neighbourhood of Milton.

1. Pete’s Wired Speed Test – Anything using the Bell DSL lines has barely an upload of 1Mbps and wildly inconsistent download speeds.  I dropped DSL and went to cable years ago, and get consistent speeds wired to the modem.
   
2. Pete’s Wifi Near the Modem – I was getting great speeds near the modem with a high-end ASUS gaming router.
   
3. Pete’s Wifi in Other Rooms – I was getting bad speeds in parts of my home, and added on some additional Asus AImesh routers to expand the range.  After a year of complaints from the family and issues with roaming between rooms I sold all of my Asus gear and replaced it with Eero in the summer of 2020.  Wifi has been rock solid since then, with full speeds everywhere in the home.
   

In the summer of 2014 I came across a little startup in Ottawa called Nuvyyo who had come up with a new concept in their Tablo over-the-air PVR.  I visited the office, met with the CEO, and picked up one of their boxes that makes over-the-air broadcasts as simple as using Netflix.  For a full year I ran Media Center and Tablo in parallel, stayed in touch with the company via their active community page, and rode the wave of rapid iterations as a beta tester.  Last week with the new fall TV season approaching, I finally wiped my old Media Center PC and have put it to new use as a Windows 10 PC.

I am so very close to the goal that I set for myself back in 2011 to cut the cable while still ensuring that content creators get paid.  Put another way – I don’t want to pay for a ridiculously over-scoped cable package, but at the same time I don’t want to steal content.  Tall order.

Today I am happy to report that my entire family can very easily record all of the network television they want and get access to it on any TV in the house or any mobile device anywhere in the world via Tablo.  We can watch every Blue Jays game from anywhere (which in 2015 is a definite must-have) via MLB.TV.  We can get access to thousands of movies and television shows through Netflix, and we can rent first-run movies whenever we want through the many different services on Roku.

The only real gap here is that we aren’t always online, and I’ve had to hack my way around that a little bit so I can have access to the content I’ve paid for when disconnected – in an airplane, on a road trip with the kids, in a hotel with terrible wifi.  Tablo Ripper pulls recordings off of the Tablo, PlayOn downloads video for personal use from Netflix and other streaming sites, and the iPad app Infuse makes it super-easy to take that content with me when I’m off the grid.  My old Media Center PC has been repurposed to act as the hub for my offline tools where it collects and consolidates as much of the content possible for offline use.

So let’s sum that all up – as of Fall 2015 here is what is driving the Near household’s entertainment:

Antenna:  Channel Master 4221 mounted in the attic
PVR:  Tablo 4-Tuner PVR with WD Elements 2TB hard drive
Set-Top Box:  Roku 2 (Model 4210)
Other Services:  Netflix, MLB.TV
Offline Tools:  PlayOn, Tablo Ripper, Infuse

We’re getting close, but we are still living in a world of content silos.  Content owners are finally opening up to the idea of letting people have access to what they want when they want, but they’re all fighting to be the one place where you go to get that content.  That’s never going to happen, and they’ll wake up to it eventually but for now it’s a hunt-and-peck universe for us consumers and sadly yes it is still easier to steal content than it is to pay for it.  I have a glimmer of hope that the new Apple TV will start to pull some of this together finally through universal search, but it’s a faint glimmer to be honest.

Here’s hoping that the trend continues: that I will be able to pay for the content that I want, that it will become easier to access and consume that content, and that eventually it will be easier to pay for content than it is to steal it.

So I went to my local gym to sign up, and spent an hour with a trainer.  His first question was “what’s your goal”?
“I dunno, to be more healthy” was my response.  He didn’t like that answer, and after taking me into the gym to prove to me that I was completely out of shape he came back at me with a hard personal training sales pitch that ended with “well y’know mate you’ll never be able to do it on your own”.  He had no idea how motivating that statement would be, he had just challenged a cheapskate to save money.  Game on!

So I set upon a path myself, but everywhere I went I kept coming up against the “what’s your goal” question – websites, apps, workout routines.  Fine, I picked a random goal of 250lbs which at the time meant losing a little over forty pounds.  Seemed reasonably drastic and difficult, yet attainable.

Just having a goal wasn’t going to keep this geek moving though, I needed technology.  So I started with a calorie-tracking app called MyFitnessPal, which has pretty much every food known to man available to be tracked against a daily goal of calorie intake.  The app gives you a daily goal based on how fast you want to lose weight (I chose 1.5 pounds per week).  Eat too many calories in the day, earn those calories back via exercise.  My youngest daughter Jaimee had a fun time with that one, and would take me out in the neighbourhood to be my trainer for walk/run/walk intervals while watching the calories tick off on another exercise-tracking app called Endomondo.  I started to really like the whole calorie in / calorie out thing and gave myself another goal of tracking it for at least a month before I could buy some additional fitness gadgets.

I stuck with it, and my reward was the gear that is now part of my daily routine.  I still use MyFitnessPal to track calories in, I bought a Fitbit watch to constantly track calories out, and a Fitbit Aria scale to track weight and body fat every morning.  Through the magic of the cloud, it all just syncs together in MyFitnessPal so that at any given moment I know where I stand with respect to calories in the day.  Yay!

The tech only tracks what you’re doing, it doesn’t actually do any of the work for you.  Some people have noticed my weight loss and they always ask me what it is that I’ve changed about my lifestyle (getting that question so often is the main reason I’m writing this article, so I’d better answer it).

So what has changed in my daily routine:

• Remove high-calorie items from the everyday diet.  That means no sugared pop, no juice, light beer only (cuz who’s kidding who, I’m not giving up beer), milk only with cereal and just water with most meals.  Drinks are the “easy” ones to get rid of, but I also stay away from high-calorie snacks in general, replacing with lower-calorie options.  I’m now that guy who asks to see the nutritional info before buying or ordering anything.
• High-calorie items only when I want it enough to put in extra work.  Eat less on days when I’m going out for dinner, Extreme Pita as my fast-food kick instead of McDonalds, extra time at the gym if I’m going out for beer and wings.
• An exercise routine that I try really hard to stick to.  It’s booked into my work calendar like any other appointment, and if I need to move it for some reason it gets moved to another day or time.  Two visits to the gym per week for weight-training on the machines, and a ninety-minute hike on the weekend while my daughter is at synchronized swimming class.  Extra exercise when I have the opportunity, including walks around the neighbourhood.
• Track it all.  I honestly don’t think I would have been successful without getting obsessive about tracking.  Yes, I know it’s incredibly annoying especially for my family as I enter things into my iPhone at dinner but it’s been key for me.

I noticed after about three months that my clothes weren’t fitting any more.  I had dropped two inches on my waistline and the pants wouldn’t stay on.  That was a conundrum, because while I needed clothes I was also hoping that I would lose more weight.  I bought enough clothes to get my by for a few more months, and boxed up the clothes that were getting way too big.  I own two pairs of dress pants and three dress shirts that fit, which gets me by for most work functions for now (although I think my colleagues are starting to notice the limited wardrobe).

After a few more months, I actually found myself unable to eat as much as I had in the past and staying under the calorie goal became more the norm than the exception.  They say your stomach shrinks, I’m guessing that’s what has happened.

And to completely bury the lead in the story, this week I hit my 250lb goal and can officially declare my arbitrary goal as having been met.  Yay!  I’m down almost four inches at the waistline, down a full shirt size, and looking visibly healthier in photos. 

I’m not done yet though, turns out that arbitrary goal wasn’t quite enough and I still have some more weight to lose before I’ll call it mission accomplished and go wild on a new wardrobe.  I’ve tried pretty hard not to talk about it all the time because I know that can be annoying, but I figured this milestone was a fair excuse to share.  I’m proud of the work I’ve done so far and look forward to continuing down the path to a healthier lifestyle.

This story has been told before, back when Napster took off and changed people’s expectations about how they get access to music.  The industry wanted you to buy the old way (dropping $15+ on the album at your local retailer), people wanted to buy a new way (only buying the songs they want, and listening to them however they please).  While the industry fought to keep things the way they were, the pirates made it easier and more convenient to steal.  It became easier to steal music than it was to pay for it.  Eventually, the industry was forced to give in and now thrives on new models that allow people to pay for the music they want.

Fast-forward to today, and we are seeing very much the same story with television.  Cable companies have grown the monthly bill to a point where people no longer see value in paying too much for just the small amount of content they want.  The industry is fighting to hang on to that old model, and the pirates have made it easier and more convenient to steal.  Most content is locked up in the all-too-expensive cable bill, what isn’t locked up in cable is spread across too many exclusive and hard-to-navigate apps.  It is now easier to steal content than it is to pay for it.

I believe that if people can pay for content they will, and that’s been my view on cord-cutting.  I have taken the approach in the past that I will only write about options where money flows to the artists who made the content, and have not written about the more shady options for cutting the cord via theft.  However, now that these conversations seem to be going more mainstream I’m genuinely concerned about the general public getting misleading advice on cord-cutting and want to take some time to talk about all of the options to ensure that the dialogue is out in the open.  If you’re what I call tech-curious but not quite tech-savvy, here are the options you’re likely to bump into in 2015.

Option #1 – Antenna and Netflix

Back in the day, you would connect your television to the rabbit ears and pull in that snowy picture from your local network.  The experience wasn’t very good, which is why cable became so popular in the 80s as a way to deliver a consistently sharp picture where antenna could not.  What you might not know however is that the TV antennas are still out there, and they’ve been modernized to deliver crisp HD quality that is often better than what you get on cable.

Indeed, antenna (also called over-the-air or OTA for short) is a great option for cord-cutters and there are a few interesting devices on the market now that will let you record all of your network television alongside streaming options like Netflix.

The Tivo Roamio, while a bit pricey, would be top of my list of boxes to try out if you’re looking to get started down this path.  I personally use a PVR from a company based out of Ottawa called Tablo TV which is very app-friendly and gets the Canadian experience right (not always a given for products that are born and raised in the United States).  Finally ChannelMaster which has been in the antenna game for years has their DVR+ box as another option.

Any of these devices, plus a whole host of other do-it-yourself options, will give you access to the majority of the content you might want.  Live TV for big sports events, PVR for first-run TV series, and a vast catalog of older television shows and movies via Netflix.

Is it for me:  check your address on tvfool to see what channels you can get, and see if that’s good enough for you.  The biggest drawback I hear from sports fans is that you don’t get access to all the games you would find on SportsNet or TSN.

Is it legal:  100% legal, yes

How much does it cost:  Assume $500 for the antenna professionally installed, Tivo costs $200 with a $15/month fee, Tablo costs $250 with a $5/month fee, Channel Master DVR+ costs $250 with no monthly fee.  Netflix costs $8/month.

What are the risks:  With over-the-air, there is a risk of poor signal which looks similar to a DVD with scratches.  A professional installer can help minimize this risk.  There is also a risk that Netflix may cause you to exceed your internet capacity, but most internet packages available today will be just fine (with the exception of a lite or rural wireless internet package).

Option #2 – Internet Streamer with geo-unlocking

Internet streamers have become quite popular, the biggest players being Roku, AppleTV, and most recently Amazon FireTV.  In all cases, they’ll give you access to Netflix and some sort of movie-rental service.  There are also some good options to buy apps for MLB baseball, NHL Hockey, and MLS Soccer.

Here’s the rub with the internet streamers though – once it identifies that you’re geographically located in Canada the content available to purchase really drops.  For that reason, many people with internet streamers also pair them up with a geo-unlocking service that can make you appear to be coming from somewhere else in the world.  A good geo-unlocker like unblock-us can let you get access to BBC content from the UK, vastly better Netflix content from the US and the rest of the world, and will take care of annoying local blackouts on the sports apps.

Personally, I use an AppleTV which has the added ability to do what is called “AirPlay”.  Basically, if you can get something on your iPad or iPhone then you can send it to your TV with one tap.  Between the apps that are natively on the streamer and the apps on my iPad, there is a good selection of content available to be streamed.

Is it for me:  If you’re not that into first-run TV series, and are looking mostly for movies or rerun television then yes I’d say an internet streamer will work for you. Also the best option for live hockey, baseball, and soccer (at a price of course).

Is it legal:  The streamer itself is legal yes, but the geo-unlocking service is a gray area.  It’s like cross-border shopping – you can get better selection, better prices, but at the same time you might be depriving a Canadian company of the opportunity to make money.

How much does it cost:  Expect to pay about $100 for a streamer (there are many options), $5/month for a good geo-unlocker.

What are the risks:  Content providers are constantly changing what you have access to.  Some iPad apps block you from displaying on a TV, some television apps have been forcing you to enter your cable bill info before you can get access.  It’s for this reason I recommend this if you’re not that into first-run TV shows, frankly it can be a bit of a pain in the butt to watch first-run TV on a streamer.  Also pay attention to your internet data caps, you’re starting to get into the territory where there is real risk of going over your cap and your ISP starts to charge you extra.  Consider alternate internet providers with better caps like Start or Teksavvy.

Option #3 – Illegal Online Streaming

The illegal online streams are easy to find, and they are also highly risky.  You’re likely to come across them if you search for something like “watch game of thrones online”, which will take you to any number of sites that have links to streaming versions online.  What you’ll also notice are things like porn advertisements, links to get you to go to other sites, or the forced install of some sort of software.  In most cases, these are very bad and they are trying to make a quick buck by forcing you into advertising loops or worse by hijacking your computer for any number of nefarious purposes.

There are also a handful of streaming sites that are popping up with a subscription fee, like hockeystreams.com.  While I have less safety concerns about these types of offshore-run services, have no doubt about it that these are selling you illegal content.

The moral of the story with illegal internet streams:  Seems too good to be true?  It probably is…

Is it for me:  Is free content more important to you than your privacy or having someone install something that will keep track of the next time you log in to your online banking?  Then illegal online streams are for you.

Is it legal:  There is no gray here, this is illegal

How much does it cost:  Generally free.

Risks:  Real risk of getting some sort of virus or theft of data from your computer.  Content quality varies quite a bit, and what you click on might not get you what you’re expecting.

Option #4 – Pirating Platforms

This is the one that gives me the most heartburn, because too many people think that these are legal.  You’ll hear terms like BitTorrent, CouchPotato, Sickbeard and XBMC which by themselves are not illegal, however in this context they’re usually being used to get access to illegal content.  What is most challenging here is that these are the platforms that are doing a good job at delivering what people prefer – an easy to use, professional-looking app to get access to content you actually want.  If only the content owners would design something similar they’d probably make a fortune.  Alas, they prefer to stick to their old ways and so it’s the pirates that have the better platform.  I’ve seen all-in-one boxes like LibertyTV become this generation’s “unlocked cable box”, where anyone can buy something that is so easy it looks legit.

Be aware though, regardless of how polished things look it is still illegal.  The geeks that created these platforms are in a constant game of cat and mouse with the content owners.  While there might be technical ways to cover your tracks, I can virtually guarantee that the majority of “average” people who are using these things are being tracked.  You are stealing, you are stealing quite openly, your IP address is on a list somewhere ready to be used if and when someone wants to sue you.  Yes, there are limits on damages and yes there are still court battles to be fought but do you really want to be a potential test case?

Is it for me:  Are you okay building a record of multiple legal infractions?

Is it legal:  No.

How much does it cost:  While there are do-it-yourself options, a pre-built XBMC box costs about $200-300

Risks:  Aside from the legal discussion above, you should also be aware that because of the cat and mouse nature of pirated content it is highly likely that this will just stop working at some point and will require regular tweaking from a technical geek to keep it up to date.

Conclusion

We are at a transition point with television delivery, and I am confident that some day in the not-too-distant future there will be a way for good honest people to spend their money on the content they love.  The reality is that today is not that day, if you want to legitimately get access to content then you’ll either have to pay your cable company for content you don’t want or you’ll have to work extra hard to find legitimate ways to buy content from across multiple silos.

Some will choose to bypass all of the complexity that the old industry has erected and simply steal the content instead.  I don’t want to be someone who promotes that approach, but I figure that if you were going to steal anyways then this article isn’t going to change your mind.  The conversations are happening, and often with misleading information about the legality of the options.  I hope that a fully open conversation about the options does help to educate those who are just now thinking about cutting the cable, so that your eyes are wide open if someone holds your hand and takes you down a path that might get you into trouble with the law.

As I said at the beginning, this story has been told before and I am confident that eventually, it will have the same ending.

The fine print:  This discussion is very limited to options that I see come up in conversation with the tech-curious.  Yes I know about new option x, and that linux option y, and the super-nerdy option z.  I’ve made assumptions here which I know are likely to cause “yeah, but” type arguments with the tech-savvy crowd.  There are plenty of places where you can go for details and fine-grained arguments and legal use cases for the tech-savvy.  Feel free to point those out in the comments.