Incommunicado

[drscott]

My DSL needs Viagra.

That is, it won't stay up. The SBC folks were around and about all day working on it, so far not fixed. Since the first trouble three weeks ago, I've seen three other guys trying to poke around in the buried line box in front of my house. Big problem, apparently....

So y'all won't hear from me much [muffle those cheers, please!] until it's fixed.

Comments

[furfairy.livejournal.com]

DSL still relies on the old copper telephone wires. And I do mean old. Would you consider cable?

[ciddyguy.livejournal.com]

Sorry to hear about your DSL problem. I've been lucky in that I've not had any problems with it conking out on me.

When I first got DSL back in 2001 in a "seudo" one bedroom apartment on Queen Anne Hill, I was told I had good copper lines and could at that time do the max of 7GB through put. Turned out the lines within the building had been replaced in recent years so I was lucky there.

Where I am now, don't know how current the wiring is, but I know the original jack line in the living room goes back to when the building was built in 1960, but everything past that is newer, but how new or old is anyone's guess. All I know is that all the jacks are modular now. Still, no incidence of problems here although I'm on 256/256 myself.

Both times, I've had my lines tested to verify they could handle the bandwidth (and they did.)

Anyway, good luck. Perhaps a bad jack or connection somewhere can cause ths problem, which I had, and two jacks in the living room had gone bad, but interestingly, it didn't affect the DSL, but I could not reach my land line VM though.

One more thought

[ciddyguy.livejournal.com]

Has anyone from SBC checked your modem to besure it's OK? Just a thought.

[allanh.livejournal.com]

SBC has managed to screw up DSL for me not once, but twice over the past five years. I found them to be shockingly poor at installing and managing DSL.

Each time I started to use DSL at night, it would just - stop - around 11:00 PM every night. I would call customer service, wait on hold for 20-30 minutes (never a good sign), and explain the issue, explain that I'd already power cycled the modem, and that I had no other devices on the phone line.

They would test the line, it would come back up, and they wouldn't believe me that anything was wrong.

I went through three modems and four DSL installers before giving up, and switching to a Covad DSL line from Speakeasy, which didn't have any major outages until I moved a year ago.

Last year, I tried again, for our new house in Foster City. After two abortive attempts, I gave up, got a cable modem from TCI/ATT/Comcast for surfing, and a slow (128kb) DSL line from Covad/Speakeasy for fixed-IP email use, and things have been very close to 100% uptime.

Note: If you get a cable modem ... be certain to get a hardware-based firewall. You'd be amazed at some of the things I found when I put a protocol analyzer on the wire. Other than that, I've been delighted with the speed of the cable modem.