If you are looking for networking stuff today, sorry. I’ve had a very interesting few days fighting with Verizon about our DSL connection, and I wanted to report on the story. It does have some work implications, as you’ll see. But mostly I need an off-topic day to rant! If you want to share my rant, please do. Otherwise come back tomorrow when I resume my regularly scheduled posts.

Although we didn’t realize it at the time, our DSL connection has been gradually degenerating for the past month or longer. We just thought it was slow at odd times of day. Either that or my son was hogging bandwidth with one of his on-line games.

It started to get really bad on last Thursday, but it’s only in retrospect that I’ve figured that out. Looking back, that was the day my son couldn’t get Netflix to stream a Watch Instantly video. Then on Friday evening, I bought a Monopoly game for my iPhone. It took an awfully long time to download and install, but I thought it was just a big file. However, it crashed my iPhone when I tried to run it. At the time, I thought it was the game. Now I think it was a corrupted download. I’ll know for certain when I re-download it, which I won’t be testing until we get back from our Disney trip (we leave on Saturday!). I need my phone while we are gone, and testing stuff isn’t high on my priority list now. I deleted the game, and phone is fine now. I want it to stay that way until we get back.

Back to the Verizon story. On Saturday, our connection was very sluggish. Text pages would load, slowly, but they would load. Anything with images or video, though? Forget it! My husband was okay most of the day. He could get to his fanfiction sites. I managed (with patience) to get one of my game sites to load. But that was about it. All three of us tried over the course of the day to call Verizon tech support. Devan and David both wandered through their “helpful” phone prompts to untimately be told, “Your call can’t be completed at this time.” I tried in the evening and finally got through to a person. A person who spoke terrible English. The phone connection was awful too, but I managed to be understood. She said they would run a 24-hour line test and let me know the results the next day.

24 hours later, we got a call back. “All fine!” Not! The connection was worse. Now even text pages wouldn’t load. I needed to check some things for our trip, and I had to use the Internet connection on my phone. Thank goodness for the iPhone and a 3G connection.

I called back. I think I got the same tech support person as the day before. Same bad English. At least the phone connection was better. One hour and 20 minutes later, we had tried changing settings, disconnecting the wireless router and a few other things. She tried to tell us it was a computer virus. Not so fast! We told her three computers and an iPhone were all experiencing the same problem. She said she would submit another repair ticket, and we would hear from a technician on Monday.

We never heard from the technician, but I did get an automated call in the afternoon from Verizon saying, “All fine!” By now, you can probably figure out that it still wasn’t fine.

Back on the phone to Verizon. This time I could not get through to support. I would go through all the options and get “Your call can not be completed at this time.” By now I was pissed. So I called back and went through the options to “add more services.” I wanted a sales person, figuring he or she would connect me to someone who could help. Score! She hooked me up with Josh, a technical support guy who spoke English well. He looked at everything and agreed the problem was on their end. According to him, if three computers and an iPhone were all affected, the problem had to be on their end. Finally, someone admitted what we had known all along! He bumped me up to “Advanced Tech Support,” and Debbie in that department took down my information and created yet another ticket.

About 5:30 in the evening, we got another “It’s fixed” call. Nope, still not fixed. Another call to Tech Support. Another work around to a sales person. Connected to another tech support guy. This time I threatened to cancel my service if someone didn’t do something. He checked and said, “Well, your ticket was closed out by the Central office, but I’m still seeing a problem on your line.” This was good. Well, not good that the Central office closed the ticket. But good that someone from Verizon finally admitted a screw-up.

He bumped it up the line again and informed me that it was now officially an outage in my area. Hooray! Now maybe something would really happen.

We went to bed hoping it would be fixed today. And it is. We have connection, and it’s faster than its been in months. I have no idea what really happened, but it’s fixed now.

So why am I writing this post from Panera? (Couldn’t you tell?) Because I discovered yesterday, in my search for a WiFi connection to get some work done, that I am more productive in a public place. Lots of people in my Twitter stream were saying it, and I have discovered it’s true for me too. So my plan is to be a digital nomad a couple of days a week.

Not a bad thing to discover. And it gives me an excuse to finally research that Netbook I’ve been lusting after for months. But I would have rather learned this without three days without Internet connection and close to four hours on the phone with Verizon.

Oh, yes. After the new year, we plan to research other broadband options. I’m kind of soured on DSL now.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 8th, 2009 at 11:04 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.