DSL Hell

A brief chronology of my disconnectedness from the net over the last few days, which mostly explains my absence:

Tuesday: In the early evening I notice that my DSL is out. I figure it might be some sort of transient outage, and decide not to act on it immediately. A few hours later, before I go to bed, it's back on. So I go to bed.

Wednesday: I come home to find that my DSL is out again. So I call my ISP, Sonic.net, and they tell me that there's some sort of general outage in my area (a switch or router at the phone company went down, or something), and that if it's still out the next morning I should call them again. I learn that when the second light on my DSL modem is flashing regularly that this means it can't connect to the system upstream - it's cut off.

Thursday morning: I call Sonic back, and while I'm on hold (!) my DSL comes back up. Probably just a coincidence that it came up right then, but I tell the representative that things look good now. He says hopefully this spells relief for a lot of other suffering Internet addicts in my area. So I leave for work. But, it's far from over yet.

Thursday evening: I come home from an evening of Ultimate to find that my DSL is down again. I'm too tired to deal with it just then, so I go to bed.

Friday morning: I call Sonic again, around 9:15 am (this time is worth noting for later). No hold time this time, which is one hint that the problem is just me, and not the wider outage. I talk to a helpful fellow who writes up a "trouble ticket" with the phone company (SBC in my case, I guess), and that SBC will be looking into it. (Oddly, Sonic uses a different name for the line provider than SBC. I'm not sure why that is. I suspect it's a generic term for company providing the physical hookup.) I also give Sonic my work number so they can call when they hear something.

Friday late afternoon: Haven't heard anything yet, so I give Sonic a call from work. They haven't heard anything either.

Friday evening: I call Sonic again, I think getting the same rep as I got in the afternoon. They still haven't heard anything. At this point they tell me that it can take up to 24 hours for the phone company to respond to a trouble ticket. So I'm advised to call back the next day once 24 hours have elapsed.

Saturday morning: I call Sonic. No word from SBC as yet.

Saturday afternoon: Another call to Sonic. This time the rep says that he assumes that I've already tried all "the usual things" to make sure I'm not getting some stray interference. Well, no, no one's walked me through these things. He asks if I have a wireless phone near my DSL modem - well, I have one about 5 feet away, but he says that's fine. He also suggests I try disconnecting all my phones from the line to see if maybe one of the phone filters blew. Otherwise I should wait to see what SBC says. He says that the phone company is not heavily staffed during the weekends, so it can take a while for them to reply.

I try disconnecting all the phones, but no luck. I take the modem downstairs to another jack but it still can't sync down there. If the problem's inside my house (a potentially expensive problem to fix), I can't tell. Unfortunately my outside phone box doesn't have a test jack, so I can't try it from there. (I wonder how I'd go about getting a test jack installed?)

Saturday evening: Okay, here's where the rubber hits the road: I'm getting increasingly frustrated with the whole process. Somehow I manage to keep my temper when I call Sonic again. I feel like it's not really their fault, it's just massively frustrating to have a problem, not know how to solve it, and to feel like I'm getting no information at all from my point of contact. Maybe I should just call SBC myself?

This time I get a helpful fellow who patiently listens to my frustrations. He calls up the SBC trouble ticket and tells me that SBC marked it as resolved Friday morning around 11 am, when they were able to connect to my modem from their end. Of course, I wasn't home then so I have no idea whether I could get out from the inside around then, but certainly by the time I got home it was not working. What happened? Did the previous reps not look up the ticket info, or did SBC not close the ticket in a way that Sonic could see until Saturday evening? I don't know how either company's internal system works, so I don't know what happened.

This rep re-opens the ticket and tells me that since it's the weekend I may not get a response until Monday. Which is fine and helpful - now I have an idea of what to expect.

Sunday afternoon: My DSL comes back up. Moreover, I have three voice mails on my answering machine - one from Sonic and two from SBC - telling me that my line has been fixed.

And (I'm writing this a week later) it hasn't gone out since, so far as I know.

So what went wrong? Beats the heck out of me. Clearly there was some localized problem with my connection, and clearly there was information floating around which I couldn't get access to. I've always had positive experiences with Sonic.net before (and so have my friends who have used them), and I don't plan to cancel my service or anything drastic like that. But there was a lack of communication at some point which was frustrating and disappointing.

I'm glad the problem got resolved, and that the problem was outside my own house wiring, but I was starting to chew leather by the end of Saturday. Grr.