In What Ways Does LCWA Support You?

How We Support You

As you probably know, all new-LCWA installations—and many member-support actions—are done by volunteers. This creates a great sense of community and it creates a feeling of neighbor-helping-neighbor. Most volunteers love doing the work and most members enjoy the sense of camaraderie.

But our volunteer availability is pretty limited these days. First, COVID-19 has caused most volunteers to say “No” to onsite visits. That’s because our first priority is be the safety of all concerned.  We need to protect our members, protect our volunteers, and ensure that LCWA activities do not result in COVID spread.

But even before that outbreak, our volunteer pool had diminished greatly. Many previous volunteers have “retired” from volunteer work. And new network-skilled volunteers are harder and harder to find.

Because of these limits, in this article we want to make a clear statement of what support you can expect to receive from LCWA, and what you must go to paid outside repair services for.

LCWA Support Activities 2020

Continued Full Backbone Network Maintenance

First, LCWA staff and volunteers continue to offer full backbone network support—we are not letting up on that. If an access point (AP) goes down, then we are on it just as quickly as before COVID—perhaps even faster than before since we know internet is so important these days.

Limited New-Member Installs

LCWA volunteers are doing only limited new-member installs. We are only doing installs that are easily done by a single team member (to avoid close quarters among team members). And only installs that we can do without entering the home. We assess each install request case-by-case to determine which meet that criteria. We refer non-qualifiers to paid commercial installers whom we trust. Or we will delay the install till after the COVID crisis has cleared up.

No Volunteer On-Site Internet Expansions

A free LCWA internet install provides internet to only one point in the house. Beyond that, it’s up to you to expand your internet reach. Most volunteers don’t want to spend volunteer time doing that, and during the COVID situation volunteers can’t be doing work inside member homes anyway.

So, if you have a big house and a standard router’s Wi-Fi does not reach to all the corners or your outbuildings, it’s up to you to extend it.

The good news is, the technology for extensions has improved greatly and considerably simplified in the past few years such that most homeowners can do this themselves. We have a lot of articles on how you can do this in ways that work correctly with our network. See that list here:  https://www.lcwireless.net/routers/

Also, depending on volunteer availability, we can sometimes offer limited off-site assistance in pre-configuring some extension systems that we will then hand to you for you to install. But no matter what, extension systems that require onsite installation are beyond our ability to deal with, especially during COVID.

Site Support Is Done Remotely

These days, existing members with on-site issues will primarily receive remote support only, not an on-site visit. That policy was mostly put in place well place before David’s AirCube WiFi password seemed not to be working. It was the default cube WiFi password and I assume he was fat fingering or misreading one of the letters (they are really tiny on the bottom of the cube). I Called him and had him tell me a simpler WiFi PW he would like. I Entered it in the cube remotely and he confirmed it worked and we are good to COVID-19, but is even more applicable now.

Simply put, we supply internet up to the house, but you have to arrange at-house fixes.

So to be clear, your responsibilities include fixing (or paying to fix) rooftop radios, computers, Wi-Fi devices, routers, and wiring. You own all of these and they are yours to fix. We will study the problem remotely, and to the extent we can, we’ll coach you on a self-fix. But you or a paid contractor must do the actual repair.

Years ago, when we had tons of volunteers, often a volunteer could come to your house and help you fix it. They’d even help you with your personal computer issues—because they enjoyed it!

But, unfortunately, for the reasons above, those days are long gone.

Like the Power Company

If that policy does not seem fair to you, think of us like the power company. If your refrigerator goes out, or the wiring in the wall goes out, do you ask the power company to come fix it? Of course not.

Same with LCWA. Once we confirm an internet signal is being delivered to your building (note we can easily determine that remotely), if internet is off or poor in your house, the fix is up to you.

With that in mind, we recommend you have a self-repair part kit on hand. See this article for the items you should buy and have on hand in case internet goes off in your home.

We Will Prep New airCube Routers for You

The good news is, 90% of the time, the problem at the house is a bad or old router. And on short notice, usually within a day, we will prep a new standard airCube router for you to pick up—one you will simply plug in yourself following our included instructions. We only invoice its cost to you (about $33); volunteers do all the configuration for free. Again, in 90% of home internet failure cases, it’s the router that is bad and a new router pickup and self-fix is easy to arrange.

Because of that, even if we are unsure of the issue in your house, replacing the router is almost always our starting point for a remote-fix suggestion. We really like this new airCube router standard because it lets us do remote internet diagnosis into your home network.

Even if a bad router is not ultimately determined to be the main issue, starting with a new airCube is the best first step if you have an internet problem. It’s a quick and cheap way to narrow down the issue, and once in place, it helps us solve current or future issues for you. So, when we suggest this, please do take us up on a new router. Again, it’s only $33.

In fact, even if internet is fine in your house today, why not request a new airCube router right now? It will save time debugging your next outage. They are back in stock by the way. Supply chain issues prevented us from getting them for about 2 months, but all is well now.

The Support Process to Expect

So, here’s the net-net of these policies.

If you contact LCWA support stating: “I need someone from LCWA to come to my house and fix my internet,” unfortunately, that volunteer home visit is not going to happen.

Rather, when our support staff sees a request for help, here’s what happens next:

• We will look at the internet signal remotely and determine if internet is being delivered. If we find there is a regional outage or issue, we’ll contact our backbone network team to fix the access point. In fact, before contacting us, always listen to our 800-number status message (800-536-6149 option 1) to see if there is a regional outage in your area. If there is, there is no need to contact us further—we’re on it.
• If internet in your region is fine, we’ll next look remotely at your rooftop radio to see if it is operating well. If it looks bad, we’ll contact you and recommend next steps, which are probably hiring a contractor to re-aim it or replace it (at your cost).
• If your radio is good and you own one of our recommended airCube routers, we’ll next look remotely at the airCube diagnostics and tell you if the router is operating correctly or indicating other network problems in your house. If we see problems there, sometimes we can coach you on the phone through ways to fix it. This is why we love the airCube router—it helps us help you better and often avoids you having to pay for a contractor to come out.
• If you don’t own an airCube router, at this point we’ll suggest you get one (again, 90% of in-house issues are a bad router). In many cases, it can help or directly solve the issue.
• If you don’t own an airCube router, and you refuse to get one, at this point our hands are tied as to helping you any further. We’ll give you the contact information for a paid computer professional, one who knows our network well, to come visit your house at your expense.

So that’s our new support policies and that’s what you can expect from LCWA.