[SunRescue] Finally got DSL

[Bill Bradford]

On Sun, Dec 31, 2000 at 07:38:23PM -0600, Reagen Ward wrote:
> SWB says I'm 17,440ft from the CO.  Northpoint says I'm about 5,500ft.  I'll
> believe Northpoint over SWB, and it's SWB's own CO.  We've had a LOT of 
> trouble at work getting DSL installations straight, and it's almost always
> SWB at fault.  They'll put in weird stuff, run things funny, drop circuits,
> stuff like that, all without warning.  

Amazingly enough, even though I'm about 17.5Kfeet from the CO (I didnt qualify
for DSL when I first moved into this house, but they built an additional/closer
CO, and I qualified with that one), my SWBT-provided ADSL line has been almost
*flawless*.  I've had it now for almost a year and a half, and have only had
one or two (that I can remember) outages due to SWBT problems, and those ended
up being equipment failures.  Any other outages (no more than 3-4, usually 
lasting no more than an hour) were due to the ISP (I use Jump.Net, here in
Austin).

Compared to the other "service" I've received from SWBT (I had ISDN from them
for a couple of years, etc), this has been almost perfect.  At least with the
ISDN, tho, it qualified as a "business-class" service, so I could get on the
phone and get someone to bitch at 24/7/365, if it went down. 8-)

(one apartment complex I lived in, some drunk idiot took out the entire
junction box for the entire complex with his truck.. so no phone, or ISDN,
for about 3 days.. Come the day that they promised it would be back up, I
get home from work, phone works, ISDN is dead as a doornail.  I called up SWBT
on the voice phone, bitched at them, and had a guy with a truck out to the 
complex within an hour - conference-called in with me and the guy at the CO as
well.. had my ISDN back up within two hours, tops..)

Only thing I miss about ISDN was being able to do a lot of the connection
debugging myself.. "sho debug ISDN" on a Cisco 100x-series router is very
helpful when determining if its your fault, or the other guys'...

Bill

-- 
Bill Bradford       |    "Do you expect me to talk?"
mrbill at mrbill.net   |    "No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die!"
Austin, TX          |        -- "Goldfinger", 1964