reasonably good DSL

For five years, I did customer service/tech support at a tiny telephone company that provided voice-over-internet-protocol (VOIP) phone service. After that experience, I have stayed with a POTS (plain old telephone service) land-line for the reliability instead of going with the VOIP for savings.

Since last night, my DSL service has been erratic in a not-good sort of way. Tonight, the DSL was not working at all. Thanks to having a POTS line, I was able to call CenturyLink (nee Qwest, nee USWEST, nee Pacific NW Bell) DSL tech support. The first call got dropped with the CSR had me unplug the phone line. After a few minutes, the tech called me back and we got the DSL working. It continued to work for at least 5 minutes after we closed the call.

Twenty minutes later, I called CenturyLink for more tech support. The CSR I spoke with was stupid liar. He denied there was an outage, even though I had just called CTL tech support and got a busy signal. When a phone company’s line is busy at 8 PM, it is an extremely likely sign of an outage. When I asked him on it, he denied an outage.

The tech was adamant that what I had was a cabling problem on the inside or the outside of my apartment. He could not explain how the phone line worked with excellent quality on the same connection that was killing the DSL.

That is the first time I called about problems with my DSL in three years. I have never had a problem with my POTS line not working at this apartment. The onsite tech will be here tomorrow morning to look at the problem. My guess is the outage will be over and he will simply call me from his truck pretending to have fixed the problem.

It sucks when my internet connection is down. It is less annoying to let it be down for a bit and do other things instead of fighting the DSL problem/slow DSL all night long like I did last night.

While the South Koreans get 1000 Mbs DSL, for the US, my (“up to”) 30 Mbs is better than what most Americans have—when it works.

I am grateful for the miracle of the high-speed web access from my apartment. I am also glad I gave up streaming movies ala’ NetFlix and have a download methodology. Even with a dead internet connection, I still have 100s of hours of commercial free TV shows and movies to watch.

PS: It may have been a hardware problem. The onsite tech tested my apartment signal added a new DSL phone filter, declared it okay and left. The problem was still occurring. I called the tech back 10 minutes after he left. He was still here, came back inside, did some more testing and then replaced the DSL modem. The DSL is working now. I feel like I was lied to more than once during this process, so I am not sure what the solution was. It may have been the modem, but that could also be a smokescreen to charge me for an onsite solution and a new modem. I have little trust in Telco’s telling the truth.