OT: RE: SBC woes

[Mike Schwartz (PC Support)]

> The honorable and venerable Bob Rasmussen spoke thus:
> > It seems I remember some comments here about problems with SBC DSL
> links.
> > Other than grumbling, I'm looking for solutions.

     Several of my customers, including my own house, have problems with
SBC's DSL being intermittent.  Collectively, I've had SBC tech people look
at these connections over a dozen times.  I let them do everything they
suggested to my lines in order to resolve the problem, but no go.  

     At my house, any where from 3 to 10 times a day, the DSL will drop any
type of connection that I try to establish, including Cisco and other VPN's,
SSH, PC-anywhere and so forth.  Usually the tech people will come over,
attach their meter to the phone line for about 30 seconds, then announce
that the line is running fine and leave.

     At some of my customers, PC-Anywhere and LogMeIn.com connections
replaced the telnet and other connection methods that I was using, so that I
don't lose my work if the line drops.  I've also figured how to setup a
persistent session on Linux at some of my other customer sites.

     I live in a 10-year old suburb, so the wiring should be fairly new. I
had everything rewired, including a new line from my house to the connection
box in my neighbor's back yard.  I have 4 phone lines coming into my house,
so they switched the DSL to other copper twice, but that didn't help.  My
voice calls are clear.  They put a $75.00 DSL line filter box in my basement
that did nothing to improve the situation.  I have tried a couple of DSL
modems and just recently installed their latest DSL modem/wireless router
combo.  That didn't improve anything, either.  I even hooked just my laptop
directly to their DSL modem and worked down in my basement and didn't hook
up anything else in my network for a day, and I still had several line
drops.  About a month ago, thee guy said that he swapped out the circuit
card at their switching station, but I didn't see any improvement.

     As I recall, the gal that came one time said I'm around 1,000 feet from
their switching station, so when the line is working, I can use any speed
and get great performance. Last week, I changed back to their "basic"
service, because I wasn't getting my moneys worth paying for their fastest
"pro" speed.

     At this point, I'm sorry I dropped the cable service, but I wanted to
fool around with a DSL line.  I had good luck with DSL at several of my
other customer sites and, of course, I was trying to save money.  The cable
was costing me $59.00 a month whereas the DSL is only $19.95 a month.  The
aggravation hasn't been worth it and so far it has cost me more than if I
had kept the cable service. 

Mike Schwartz