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My DSL line on AT&T copper part 2
Mar. 17th, 2008 | 09:58 am
A couple of weeks after my last DSL outage my line went down again. Same symptoms, loop length change, lots of noise on the line, etc. I went through the trouble-shooting bit with Speakeasy and Covad again, and that ended in Covad wanting to send a tech to my house to check my inside wiring. I'm a patient man, a carpet even, when it comes to things like this. I'm understanding. I work in IT, I know things go wrong. But even I have limits. I hung up the phone and started researching my other options.
In my neighborhood I basically had cable or something else as an alternate to AT&T's copper. Cable would be through Comcast and I really don't like their business practices. Our TV is through DirecTV and that wasn't going to change, so it really didn't make sense to get Comcast's service. I opted for "something else"; wireless.
There are a couple of wireless ISP options in the SF Bay Area, but I picked Unwired Ltd.. The network is run by a small local company whose founder was a poster to BAWUG of which I was an occasional email list participant. That makes Unwired my father's brother's nephew's cousin's former roommate, so you can see where I had to pick them. The dish went up a week ago and so far I'm mostly pleased. Web pages load super fast, latency is lower than DSL (14ms to my office!). The connection is pretty heavily policed though. I've been rsyncing a backup of my personal server in the evenings and the average throughput is around 512Kbps on a 6Mbps synchronous connection. My personal server is on a 10Mbps fractional T3 that was no where near fully subscribed during the rsync, so Unwired must be scaleing back connections regardless of available bandwidth. I'm not using a standard port for ssh on either end, so that might look like P2P traffic. I'll have to send them an email about that. The interesting thing is that my bandwidth wasn't limited to 512Kbps. New connections were fast and not affected by the limit. I wonder if I can apply some of the stuff they have set up to the conference wireless network...
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This is your DSL line on AT&T. Any Questions?
Feb. 6th, 2008 | 10:39 pm
My DSL line has been down hard twice in the past four weeks, most recently for five days. Being a big geek, I run my personal domain and a couple others on a home server. So, not having an internet connection is a bit more of an inconvenience than just not being able to read slashdot. I can't get my email, my wife can't get her email, and she actually makes some freelance money through her email. So, I was, let's say, disgruntled a bit. To be more accurate, I asked my wife how much she liked one of our cars as I wanted to back it into AT&T's phone box up the street.
I placed my service call on Thursday and, initially AT&T's tech was scheduled for Friday. That didn't happen, but the tech did come on Saturday while I was out. In the past the AT&T tech's haven't been able to get to the phone box on the side of my house because they'd have to walk down my driveway to get to it. Since it is harder to find than a scientist at a Huckabee rally, I drew a map and put it in front of my house next to the gate the guards the phone box. I even drew red arrows and a path to the box that would make Bill Keane proud. The tech bothered my upstairs neighbor insisting he needed access. The neighbor was ill and in no mood to figure out what the tech wanted, so he went on his merry way. I contacted my ISP, Speakeasy, again and the support guy rescheduled AT&T for Monday. I planned to stay home Monday to escort the tech to the phone box. Fortunately I checked the trouble ticket Monday morning (dial-up, ick) and found that Covad hadn't managed to get AT&T scheduled for Monday. They'd get around to it Tuesday, probably by 1PM. 12:30 PM roles around on Tuesday, the tech shows up. He's standing outside scratching his head looking at his work order and trying to figure out how to penetrate the fortress of phone boxitude, so I go out and sherpa him down the driveway. About an hour later my line is working again perfectly.
I asked him what the problem was, and he informed me that AT&T has been conditioning lines in the neighborhood to support "LightSpeed", their new TV service, which I later discovered (with my working internet connection) is part of their U-Verse bundle. He told me that the folks working on the line tested mine for dial-tone, found none, and CUT it, despite the caps indicating it was a loop in service (I have "dry-line" DSL). It seems that, shockingly, the same intrepid explorers that can't find my phone box have no problem slashing through our local jungle of wires. The tech assured me that it probably wouldn't happen again as they were done working in my neighborhood. I'm not holding my breath. Oh, the tech also told me that the pair I was previously on was a "party line". It seems the copper in my neighborhood is that old. Probably a good thing though. Back in the day, they didn't spare expense in stringing wire.
The only up side to this is that I got to use my pringles cantenna to bridge my network to my neighbor's. I had to hack my dlink bridge/ap a bit to use an external antenna, but any day I get to use a soldering iron is a good one.
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LISA '07 in Dallas TX
Nov. 14th, 2007 | 11:29 am
location: Dallas TX
Today is also my birthday. My co-workers decorated the "laptop lounge" in my honor.
