Yet Another Fricking Blog

Every time it rains, our AT&T home phone service and DSL get spotty. Sometimes there is no dialtone. Frequently, it will drop the DSL connection. This is very frustrating. My wife works from a home office and has to go somewhere else to work when this happens.

This is what we know:

• Problem exists beyond our demarc (TNI), meaning it’s not the wiring in our house. You can plug a phone into their box on the outside wall of our house and hear the static or fast-busy or whatever it’s doing at the moment, provided it’s raining.
• Lots of aerial lines in our neighborhood (as opposed to buried).
• Technician who was already out here estimates four or five splice points between our house and the nearest cross box. In other words, those are the places where it’s likely to be having the problem.
• To fix the problem, a technician would probably have to cut in a new pair. However, they’d also want to do this while it’s raining, to make sure they don’t pick a different, equally bad pair instead.
• What this all means is, the problem has probably persisted because who wants to go climb four or five different poles in the rain to hunt down this issue? I know I sure wouldn’t want to.

Trying to use the AT&T automated trouble-reporting service is also very frustrating. Here are some reasons why:

• You’ve already told the main system that answered the phone what line you’re calling with trouble on. But once you’re connected to the actual ‘home phone line repair center’ you have to do it again, because these are two different systems that aren’t smart enough to talk to one another.
• Once you get to the part where you’re asked, “Does this affect the data portion of your line, or the voice portion?” you don’t have an option 3 for, “Both.” Even though earlier, you’re given the choice to tell them that multiple systems are affected by the problem you’re having.
• There is an eleven hour window in which the technician might show up, and of course not until Monday (though a tech I spoke with said he’d be out working on Sunday.) This pretty much can sink one’s whole day.
• There is no way to use the automated system to say, “We only have this problem when it’s raining.” If the lines have dried up by Monday, this will waste a technician’s visit for no good reason.
• Speaking to a human rep is just as useless. All they can do for you is close out the ticket, or leave it in place for the time / date when you know that the problem won’t manifest itself. They have no way to escalate the case, or at least they claim not to.

I cancelled the visit scheduled for next week, and I think we should strongly consider cancelling our service. As horrible as Time Warner cable is supposed to be, I have far more faith in that technology’s ability to carry the bits and stay online than I do with DSL… even if the company itself is reputed to be just as bad, or worse.

One other option would be to consider AT&T’s ‘U-verse’ service. Our friend has it and has reported ridiculously fast bandwidth speeds. However:

• You have to be within 2600 feet (as wired, not as the crow flies) from the nearest cross-box with a fiber termination;
• Maximum possible distance where it could work is 3300 feet;
• We live between 0.6 and 0.7 miles from the nearest crossbox, which is 3168 – 3696 feet… not likely to work. (The “is it available in my area?” system says no.)

Suck.