The DSL nightmare is over…
… hopefully anyway.
It all started about three months ago when we got official notice from AT&T about the new data caps they were instituting, and how they really weren’t bluffing and we’d get three months of reprieves before they start charging us. I spaced on the date, and we got a notice about two weeks ago we’d gone over our 150GB limit and we’d be charged.
I’d already called around and figured out that our next most likely stop would be EarthLink. I liked the idea of Comcast Business (who apparently now do service our area), but the contracts and setup fees were prohibitive to us. With EarthLink, after calling up no less than three times, I finally found someone who was willing to let me sign up without a contract.
We placed the order in the middle of the month, and the guy told me that the provisioning wouldn’t go through unless we cancelled with AT&T first, and that I should do it right now. The hardware won’t be here for five days and the line definitely won’t be on for six, but go ahead and cancel right now. I explained we couldn’t be down that long, and that I’d rather wait, and then start the process once we had all the equipment and such.
Sunday night comes along, and AT&T suddenly disconnects us. Whoops.
The ATM shit on our DSL is down until Tuesday morning, when it suddenly works again. I put the new PPPoE information in, and we’re up and going… but really really slowly. The new modem and stuff came, so I hooked it up and the speeds were no better (couple that with the fact I can’t find any way to make a Zyxel p-660r-d1 actually hand over the WAN IP to the routing device, which my FreeBSD router needs in order for online games to function acceptably) so I give ’em a call.
The AT&T tech (since AT&T own the lines, EarthLink just leases them) the next day, and when he gets here the DSL is completely dead again. After some diagnosis, he determines it’s a busted linecard at our central office and replaces it. We’re up and running, but it’s only at 1.5mbps until EarthLink reprogram it with our package info. I can deal with that.
That night, the DSL blinked a few times in the space of about a half an hour, before going dark completely for about 15 minutes. When it came back up, we were at full rate (6mbps down, 768kbps up), fast data path (as opposed to interleaved, which I gather introduces additional latency), and all that good stuff.
So far, so good - no major issues since - but it’s only been 24 hours.
