Local cable company doing a good job
By Charles Miller April 11, 2008 San Miguel de Allende

Back in the last century when the internet was just becoming available to all and at the same time that telephone caller-ID also was becoming available, I worked on developing a piece of computer software to serve as a telephone answering machine.

The concept was to take advantage of all this new technology and create the means for a computer to answer the phone, identify who was calling from the caller-ID and answer the call with an individually customized greeting for each one of my friends. The system also replaced the ringing phone with a recorded sound file so that incoming phone calls were announced in the voice of the caller.

More than that, I created the software to interface the answering machine with the internet. My program could send me an email when someone left a voice message. Using a list of “important clients,” it could forward their calls to my cell phone. I could access my phone messages back home from any internet café as I traveled to other countries.

This software project actually works but turned out to be the kind of program only a computer geek could love. The fact that it took dozens and dozens of hours to set up made it unmarketable.

Nevertheless, the prototype machine has been working at my house since 1998. It resides on an old Pentium I computer running Microsoft Windows 98 with a bare 32 megabytes of RAM. I take a certain amount of pride in having done something so well it continues to serve me after all these years.

When computer programmers are developing new software, they frequently build in error-logging capabilities to help with the process of debugging. Typically, the error logging takes the form of a text file stored on the computer. This error logging usually is removed in the final software version.

Without my paying it notice, my prototype answering machine continued to log all the activity and errors as it functioned over the years. The log file is now thousands of pages long and when I ran across it recently it proved to be the source of a very interesting statistic.

Since my answering machine software was designed to interface with the internet, it checked to see if a live internet connection was present, and did so every 15 minutes, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

What I discovered as I looked at the log files was that I had unintentionally created an audit of the reliability of my internet service provider.

My answering machine is now connected to the internet via Cybermatsa, the local cable provider. The logs showed their internet connection had failed more than 100 times over the last year.

That will not surprise people here who complain their internet service is interrupted frequently. As high as that number sounds, though, it is dwarfed by a much larger one. Testing every 15 minutes, 96 times a day, the log file showed more than 32,000 successful tests during that year.

My equipment automatically resets when there is an outage and it is clear from looking at the log files that most of the internet outages we experience here in San Miguel are not of long duration.

The numbers do not lie. Cybermatsa has in fact maintained 99.6-percent uptime based on a sampling taken every 15 minutes for one year. Mine is not a scientific test, but tells me our local cable company is actually doing a very good job.

Charles Miller is a freelance computer consultant, a frequent visitor to San Miguel since 1981 and now practically a full-time resident. He may be contacted at 044-415-101-8528 or email FAQ8 (at) SMAguru.com.