Netflix is in Puerto RIco!

We don’t have cable TV. The main reason is because I am a television addict. Sit me in front of a TV after 7:00pm and I am useless. I go into a hypnotic state and am pretty much good for nothing. Also, Time Warner Cable Choice Cable won’t bring cable to our neighborhood (even though we are on a main road with cable).

When we do watch TV, we decide which show we are going to watch and watch it on Hulu or one of the many streaming movie services on the web. The streaming movie services are all based in other countries that allow it and they are usually plagued with pop up advertisements, are poor quality and are anything but consistant.

We have been members of Netflix for years and when we are in California or traveling, we take advantage of their online streaming movies and tv shows, but they only owed the rights for the 50 states and when streaming was attempted from Puerto Rico, it wouldn’t stream and in place of the movie/tv show it would state that they don’t have the rights to show the program in Puerto Rico.

Well, all that has changed now. I received an email from Netflix yesterday saying their service now works in Puerto Rico! Yeah, cheers to Netflix for making the effort to gain the Puerto Rico market. We are stoked.

Last night I stayed up way too late watching a movie in bed on my laptop, and I’m stoked!! The streaming was SUPER fast, it never got interrupted or lost its quality.

Speedtouch Modem - PRT Dmax

The IP address is: http://10.0.0.138/
The username is: The Serial Number on the bottom of the modem (S/N)
The password is: The Serial Number on the bottom of the modem (S/N)

It’s so simple! I remember that it is some of the numbers on the bottom of the modem, but there are a bunch of different numbers down there so when my browser forgets my user/pass…I am sometimes left clueless.

Here is a screenshot of what we used to look like:

Summer and I have been blogging about our move to Rincon (and Puerto Rico in general) for a couple of years now and we been meaning to update our look for a while. The problem is that Summer and I have different tastes when it comes to websites, so it took about a year for us to finally find something we both liked.

Any how, hope you like the new look! We’re going to be tweaking the site during the next few days and adding all sorts of fun new goodies, so let us know if you find anything weird or not functioning properly.

From here on out, I am going to upload one liners and photos from my phone just like I do on facebook.

Let me test a picture:

I have made several calls to PRT (Puerto Rico Telephone) informing them of the difficulties we have been having and they have tried to fix our problem from their computer center (in San Juan maybe?) but none of their fixes have worked. Finally, last week, they said they were going to send a technician to our house to check on the problem. I told them all the problems started with the wind storms and it could be our line and they said it was probably faulty wiring in our house.

I bet that line works in Puerto Rico all the time.

It didn’t work today, I informed them that our modem/router is hooked directly into the line the PRT service man installed in our house and that the phone does not run anywhere else and it’s still not working.

I called over the weekend to see what the status was and finally on Monday (after getting disconnected every time I hit 2 for an English speaking operator) our phone line went out completely. I unplugged our router and plugged in a telephone and it had no dial tone. Hmmm. That tells me there is something wrong with the phone line and not our Internet. I called back and was told that they were working on it but that wasn’t a good enough answer for me. I was escalated to a manager that has been trained to say; yes Mr. Rest, I understand and I’m so sorry. He doesn’t care about my problem and he certainly didn’t escalate the service call. I called back on Tuesday after no one showed up on Monday and they said they had a support ticket and someone would be coming over in the next 48 hours. I told them that we have commercial DSL because we run our businesses on it and that it was an emergency. The supervisor promised me someone would be out immediately…in the next 24 to 48 hours to check the lines.

For the past 5 days Summer and I have been working at friends houses, friends offices and Cafes and we still have no DSL at the house and we are still getting the run around every time we call PRT. I have been researching other Internet providers in Puerto Rico, but there aren’t many in our neck of the woods (West side Rincon) so our really only other option is to go with Satalite…which I am hesitant to use because I heard that our Internet will go down every time it gets cloudy.

On a good note, last night, Summer figured out we could mooch off of a neighbors wireless network and get three bars if we sit in the right spot on the porch.

Internet Update 11:51am Friday April 3rd: As I was driving home from Mark’s House this morning (FatAndTan Photography) I saw a little PRT pick up truck heading my way. I basically pulled into the center of the road so he couldn’t pass, asked him if we were on his repair list for today and he said yes…he followed me back to the house. He inspected our line at the pedestal (where all our utilities come in) and there was no tone (good sign, if the problem were the line running from the pedestal to the house we would have had to figure out how to run 250 feet of telephone line under ground to the house) so he went up to the main utility pole at the end of our street. He told me that the line was disconnected and that was most likely the problem. He reconnected it and just like MAGIC, our Internet is back up.

Puerto Rico Telephone is still on my shit list, but in time, all wounds heal. Let’s see if our PRT Internet service gets back to fast and consistent like it used to be.

Didn’t you miss Kuta, Cheech, Monkey, Stefan and me staring at you from up there?!

The first year of DMAX was great. We had very high upload and download speeds and never had any connectivity issues. As of about October, our DMAX DSL has gone down hill, BIG TIME. It is constantly going offline and has been quite slow.

I am going to start researching other options again (1 year later) and see if there are any ISP’s in Puerto Rico that can offer consistent, high speed quality Internet. If you have any suggestions for me or would like to share an experience with us, please post below, it could help everyone (including Summer and I) out!

I am excited about the new layout and will finally be able to organize the site so that it is easier to navigate, more user friendly a great resource for people visiting or planning to move to Rincon Puerto Rico. This blog is a work in progress all the time. We won’t have everything up and going on the site for another week or two, but this was a big first step.

For all of you that have been commenting without any feedback or your comments appearing, we apologize. Hopefully, this won’t happen again.