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

[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.