AI helped me test a chewed cable and get our internet working better

It's been raining since we got back from vacation. A couple of weeks, almost every day. A few gaps here and there, but mostly everything has just been wet. Like, wet wet.

And since the rain started, our internet had been horrible. Doing my live podcast was getting difficult because the connection would become unstable. Work was slower. Streaming was having problems.

Then I started moving files from OneDrive to Google Drive and the migration was crawling. At that point I was done tolerating it.

So I started asking AI questions. Here's what's happening. It's been raining constantly. Is it possible the outside cable from the box to the house is part of the problem?

It gave me several possibilities, and I kept coming back to one thing: last year Elden got into the backyard where he wasn't supposed to be and chewed on that wire.

He hadn't bitten it in half. There were just a couple of marks on it. But now I was wondering whether water could have worked its way into that damaged spot over time.

That was possible. Okay. If that's the problem, is replacing the wire something I can realistically do? I'm relatively handy. It's coaxial cable. It's not rocket science.

I took pictures of the outside box and we worked through what I was actually looking at. There was some confusion at first because the cable doesn't just plug into another loose cable at the house. It runs through the wall and ends at the wall plate inside.

For a minute that sounded like replacing it would mean pulling the wall apart, which was not what I had in mind.

Then we realized I didn't have to do that just to work out whether the outside run was the problem. I could temporarily bring a new cable in through the door and connect it inside. That gave me a way to test the idea without committing to tearing anything apart.

From there we got into the very glamorous world of F connectors, compression connectors, cable length, and what parts I actually needed. AI used the Lowe's connector to build a list from the local store. I sent that to Jason and he picked everything up on his way home.

We replaced the damaged run and brought the new cable into the house. Then we tested again. The connection improved immediately and, since then, the internet has been much closer to normal.

Not perfect. I'm not going to pretend we proved every remaining internet problem was caused by that cable. But changing it made a noticeable difference.

The file migration made that especially obvious. It had been crawling before the repair. Afterward it started moving considerably faster and finished earlier than the estimate we'd been watching before.

I had an old detail in the back of my mind about Elden chewing that cable. AI gave me a way to test whether that detail mattered, figure out what I was looking at, and work out what we'd need to fix it. It hadn't magically diagnosed the internet.

Then we did the physical part. And the internet got a whole lot better.