Primer on DSL Customer Service
OK, Ma Bell is back in town. It's not entirely bad news if you know how to deal with Ma. First of all, she owns the hardware, which in my experience is absolutely essential to effective repairs. I'm not defending monopolies and their tendency to price like a starved predator. You should see my obscene TV cable bill. Nevertheless I discovered how you can get customer service from the DSL folks at AT&T (or other telephone provider) when your connection gets buggy.

1. Remove everything you can from the DSL telephone line to reduce "line load." Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS) was not designed to have two splitters to serve a dialup modem, a TIVO, two cordless phones, and your DSL. At most, a DSL line should have DSL and one or two phones, nothing more.

2. Don't simply trust the AT&T DSL speed test site. In my experience, their results are all over the map. I happen to live close enough to the Argonne National Laboratory and they have a wicked slick speed test server that runs Java. Find an alternative DSL speed test server closest to your location, run both, and compare results. If your speed is off, reset your DSL modem. Not just for a second, hold the button or unplug it for a minute. And by the way, manufacturer claims notwithstanding, these little black boxes can be affected by radio frequency interference (RFI) so it's best to have the shortest wire from the wall to your modem as possible and put that thing as far from everything in the room that creates RFI as possible.

3. Internet security be danged, plug your computer directly into the modem. Customer service will instantly blame any router, firewall, switch, cable, software firewall, antivirus program, and any other doohickey between your Internet browser and their modem. Remove them all. The ultimate removal of all blame is to remove Windows. They love to blame Windows and tried at one point to get me to reset my Internet settings to "wide open naked to hackers." The best trick of all: get a Mac. Before I learned all these tips, my first call to customer service was three hours, literally. Rather than plan ritual suicide, I took notes. Now I do all these things, then boot my Mac laptop cabled directly into the modem and I can get from "customer service" (where you don't want to be if you know what you're doing) to "technical support" in 15 minutes where the person at the other end might actually fix your problem.

4. This is Ma Bell, so be patient, friendly, cooperative, follow instructions, and persist. After three or four calls in four months I convinced the AT&T tech support guy that my fast DSL connection was dropping down into safe mode (referred to by DSL techs as interleaved) at least every three weeks, so he gave in and actually sent a human being to my house. Because I had no significant line load and nothing between their modem and my browser could be blamed, he focused on the wire to the central office. There was noise, and a lot of it, due to an artifact of they way phones used to be wired. So he called up a big bucket truck. I have proof: there's a picture of it in my back yard on this page. The guy in the bucket truck fixed it and now I'm surfing fast with half the line noise. The truck was so heavy it got stuck in the snow and they had to call a tow truck to get it out. And no charge for the house call.

In order to sell the whiz bang combined services of phone, Internet, and TV they plan to sell, AT&T is going to have to rewire what may be hundreds of thousands of miles of network. POTS lines were a big fat cable with a lot of twisted pairs (one pair per phone) and when you ordered a line, they "tapped into" a pair near your home and ran a line to your house. The rest of that wire kept going down the line. DSL works best on a dedicated line from your location to the central office. The extra 200 feet of unused line to the end of my street that my DSL line was tapped into was creating a nasty echo of DSL data packets, like ripples in water hitting the shore and feeding back on incoming waves. So the bucket truck guy simply cut it off.

AT&T has another challenge. Using modern technology - those obnoxious little gray boxes that are sprouting on telephone poles like mushrooms everywhere - phone companies have been digitally splitting twisted pairs into multiple lines. That's fine if you just use it for phone. As far as I know, it makes the line ineligible for DSL and it drops your bandwidth as low as 14,400 kbps if you're on dialup. If you're on dialup and complain, which I did before we had DSL, I was told that the law only requires them to only deliver 14,400 kbps. Nice.

We tried DSL from a competitor of AT&T for several months prior to switching over. That signal constantly dropping into half speed. They told me it was a problem with "the card in the cage at the central office" which they actually leased from a third party. But I doubt it. When I called AT&T, they told me that our previous DSL phone number was ineligible for DSL but they couldn't tell me why. Based on the above perhaps you can venture a guess. Had the previous vendor been assigned our current DSL line, they still would have never figured out nor fixed the line noise problem. Because the unused 200 feet of twisted pair through my neighbor's back yard is AT&T's property in Illinois and the DSL vendor was in another state.

When it comes to DSL, caveat emptor. When it comes to AT&T DSL, remove everything on your side their customer service can blame so technical support might just get down to business on their end and fix it. In my case, they did.