DSL woes

Over the past several days I’ve been having some DSL/wireless problems at home.  My DSL subscription is 6 years old when the company used to be called Pacific Bell and were giving out static IP addresses!  Pacbell became  SBC, then SBC Yahoo!, and now AT&T.  Back then when you ordered DSL a real person actually came to your house and walked you through the installation process and modem installation!

Well I think my problem goes all the way back to day one of my subscription.  Normally, when you subscribe for DSL the tech will determine if your house is wired for DSL.  If not, like mine was, they would install a POTS splitter.  POTS is an acronym for Plain Old Telephone Service.  POTS is the regular phone wiring that is available in all homes.  The POTS splitter would be installed outside your house at the point of demarcation, essentially where the POTS line enters in your home, normally in your garage or underneath your apartment complex.  So what the techs should do is install an outdoor POTS splitter at the demarcation point so that all your phone jacks in the house should be DSL-enabled.  When I had my DSL installed 6 years ago, the tech installed the POTS splitter inside the house in the second bedroom. 

Well as you can imagine over time we had kids, technology changed, and computer use increased.  The kids took over the second room and I installed a wireless switch so that I could get Internet access in the master bedroom/office.  For the past 2 years I’ve been on a wireless network at home and the connection hasn’t been the best.  I get a lot of dropped connections (using both native and windows drivers) preventing more than 1.5-2 hours of continuous connectivity.  The problem is not my DSL it’s my cheapo D-Link wireless switch which has a weak signal and possibly due to the flurry of other WiFi signals throughout my complex.  I’ve become more and more aware of this problem since I’m working more from home and the issue has become very annoying since VPN connections are breaking and I have to re-authenticate to the corporate network every time I drop a connection.

So a simple solution, or so I thought, would be to move the DSL modem from the second room to the master bedroom.  Since, the POTS splitter was installed only for one room, all the other phone jacks in the house cannot modulate a DSL signal and my modem fails to establish a connection to the central office network.  So I made my very first tech support call to my DSL provider, Pacbell -> SBC -> SBC Yahoo -> and now AT&T.  They issueud a trouble ticket number and tomorrow a tech is scheduled to come between the hourse of 8am-12pm.  I’ve explained my plight and hopefull the tech can move the POTS splitter from the second room and put it properly to the outside of the house at the proper place so that all my phone jacks can modulate a digital signal for my modem.

In the meantime it’s intermittent wireless access.  For checking work email I’ve decided to use dial-up since its the most stable connection that I have so far from home.  In a way, hearing the old modem sounds seems much more comforting than watching the signal bar of my WiFi meter.

So we’ll see how Pacbell -> SBC -> SBC Yahoo! -> and now AT&T handles my first trouble ticket.  If they can’t handle this, I’m switching providers.  dslreports.com shows that DSLExtreme offers a good price and good (local) service so you don’t get Fred who talks to you with an Indian accent who has no idea what you mean when you say, “Can I go to Fry’s and buy that part?”