[ale] OT: dropped the land line and going naked DSL

[Jim Philips]

On Monday 25 May 2009 09:26:03 pm Jim Kinney wrote:
> When I changed to bare DSL I had to get a different modem. Signaling
> (sync) is slightly different. I've had no problems other than
> mechanical ones with the wire at the pole. I ran new wires from the
> demarc to the pole so phone-co would be forced to use known good
> wires.
>
> On Mon, May 25, 2009 at 9:48 AM, Jim Philips<philips_jim at bellsouth.net> 
wrote:
> > Well, I had ATT&T cut my land line yesterday and asked to keep DSL. So
> > far, the result is that my DSL drops about every twenty minutes. Has
> > anybody else gone naked DSL with AT&T. Is this the best I can expect?
> > Their tech guy is coming today. I'm hoping he can resolve this.
> > Otherwise, I'm just moving to Comcast. Another evil corporate giant, I
> > know

Well, so far, my connection has been dropping once every twenty minutes or so. 
I've made four calls to tech support and had two technicians visit. I've tried 
to share what I learned on this list with the technicians and tech support 
people. The tech support people don't understand anything and the technicians 
just ignore what I say and monkey with the phone jacks in the house, which has 
no effect whatsoever. The tech support people who answer the phones are worse 
than useless (no surprise there) because they don't even attempt to use what 
was tried earlier to come to some new conclusions. On Monday, supposedly, the 
*real* technicians will come out and do something to the wires on the outside. 
I may lose my patience before that and switch to cable. Not that I think the 
Comcast people are nicer or more competent, but it seems to me--rightly or 
wrongly--that getting a cable connection to work is simpler than all this stuff 
the AT&T guys have been trying over the last week.