Stand Down
At 9:59 AM today my DSL disappeared. This is annoying.
I call the number, and, of course, while working through the menus and entering my complete telephone number multiple times [Hint to service center: get caller ID, your network supports it and it would tell you my number. You give it to NSA; why not use it yourself?] a chirpy voice keeps telling me about the wonderful and easy trouble shooting tools available on-line at their web site. [Hint to service center: if I could bloody get on-line, I wouldn’t be calling the DSL service line.]
Well, it turns out they have a major problem that they weren’t aware of because no one is assigned to look at the network on a regular basis, and no one heard the plaintive call of the dying module in a main control box within a thousand or so feet of my house.
That may or may not fix my problem, but until that is dealt with they won’t be able to find out if anything else is wrong. The tech was good and is sending a new modem because I have one of their original batch of DSL modems, so it is possible that the modem is also failing. As he put it, even if the modem is still good, almost no one is still around who knows how to deal with them and the trouble shooting database is not going to help much.
The tech said that the control box should be fixed in a couple of hours, but the official guarantee is within 48 hours – oh, joy.
The techs are good, but the system sucks.
11 comments
Enjoy your new, “improved” DSL modem. Stella’s is relatively new, and frustratingly often it has intermittent problems talking to a router (actually, two different routers in succession now, which makes me more confident it’s the modem). My ancient DSL modem does not have such problems. As we are one apartment building apart, I’m pretty sure the phone company infrastructure is the same to and beyond the drop. Oh, what fun…
My current modem is set up as a bridge to my router, which is all that is necessary. I’ll keep it available if there’s a problem, but I’m not messing with what’s working.
At last! I’ve been trying off & on all day to drop some comments. I hope the 48 hours is an overestimate.
LadyMin can tell you some horror stories about her old *non-service* provider! LOL Got so bad she changed providers to fix the problem. *shaking head* I’ll have to point her to this thread. 😀 😀
BTW, I thought that in the USA, *Customer Service* something only Commie’s and Terrorists did? LOL REAL American Companies don’t need no stinkin customer service! Sheesh… Next you’ll all be wanting free healthcare or something!
Sorry (kinda)… couldn’t resist! 😀
Andante, you are seeing a separate problem that no one will own up to, but I suspect it is the fault of the registrar for my domain. You have to try a couple of times to get through. I know it’s a pain, and it is intermittent to make it harder to trace.
Kryten the actual people at the end of maze know what they’re doing, and are familiar with their equipment as well as the major equipment that people may add, like wireless routers. They are also located in the US, at Orlando, and speak English as a first language. The guy I was talking to this morning was a bit annoyed to discover that network engineering wasn’t aware that there was a problem, and spent the beginning of the call getting a work order filed to fix the box. He threw in the new modem because they are making some changes that will alter how the system works, and no one is sure if the older modems will handle the changes. It’s supposed to be faster, but he wouldn’t make any promises.
My DSL and telephone from AT&T was down pretty much all week last week. I was out of town so it was up to Madam Monk to deal with the ‘company’. She called on Monday and they immediately said that their diagnostics showed no problem on their side.
She called again on Tuesday and mentioned that people calling our number were getting random connections to other numbers…she was told again that diagnostics showed no problem.
Finally Thursday after multiple calls they agreed to send someone out to check while threatening a charge if they had to come into the house. It was fixed on Friday but we have no idea what the problem was.
The NIC box they use down here allows you to disconnect the house and plug a known good phone directly into the lines The Phone Company is responsible for. This allows you to know in advance if the problem is with your system or the company’s, and they don’t argue about it when you tell them you made the outside check and the system is worthless.
Connection to other numbers is obviously a network problem, not a wiring problem. It sounds like a bad entry in the equivalent of the DNS for the phone system, i.e. the telephone number is assigned to the wrong circuit in one of the database servers (we had two in our PBX system in Rochester, that I updated). The other possibility is an intermittent problem on the switching.
Face it, the stuff in the house is almost always pass/fail. You can’t re-route from your house beyond call forwarding, and call forwarding doesn’t affect DSL.
The one good thing I can say about Embarq is that they use network techs for DSL support, and they know the entire network, not just the modem.
I went through **5** DSL boxes in 2 years because electric would surge the sucky phone lines out here in Podunk – that’s when I switched to cable. You probably can’t get that, can you?
The cable company is a hellspawn of the first order when it comes to pricing,service or competence; and their lines are above on utility poles, make them subject to extended service interruptions, lasting weeks after a hurricane and days after someone hits a pole.
Satellite is the only alternative to DSL for a relatively consistent connection which is necessary for me to do my work.
I never did find out what the problem was with my DSL, although I suspect it was at at the phone company itself. Several weeks of going in circles with outsourced script readers eventually drove me to cable. And I do mean “script” readers. I have one of those ancient modems (an old Speedstream bridge model) and they didn’t know what to make of it, so they blamed it for the outage. I think the real problem was that there were too many entities involved …. Earthlink was the ISP, Covad was the reseller, and ATT owned the phone lines. No one wanted to do the fixing (as in pay to send out the tech).
Anyway, I am very pleased with the service from cable (so far). You don’t hear that too often. It’s faster and a few dollars a month cheaper. We have two cable companies in my town, so there is actual price competition. Amazing. I’m still not too sure how that happened.
In my case the tech just pinged my system and watched the trace. It died at a control point, so he looked at the point and saw the alarm flashing, so he sent the techs out.
They used Earthlink when they were called Sprint, but the system was the same. The hardware was their concern and they owned everything up to the wireless router.
There is only one cable company and the phone company. Their pricing is magically within a dime a month of each other. No competition as that’s bad for the corporate coffers.
There’s not much to go bad in modem if there isn’t a lightning strike nearby, so it was probably a switching problem.