DSL service [was Re:TLUG Mail list archives?]

[James Knott]

phiscock-g851W1bGYuGnS0EtXVNi6w at public.gmane.org wrote:
> Yesterday, Pathcom (the ISP in this soap-opera) announced that Bell would
> be visiting to diagnose the problem at my end.
>
> Today the Bell Service Guy came by early in the morning, while I was
> still at home. He didn't knock, he just measured the line, decided
> it was OK, and put a piece of paper through the door saying 'Sorry I
> missed you since you weren't home.'
>   

Apparently, those Bell guys have never heard of intermittent problems. 
One of my customers has frequent drop outs on one circuit.  Like with
you, the Bell guy shows up, does a quick sweep and pronounces the line
good, even though I could demonstrate that it was still failing.  It
takes a *LOT* of pushing from above to get them to move beyond that.  At
another customer (located in a small town near about 300 Km from here),
they were also having intermittent failures on an ISDN line.  Since we
knew Bell had problems locating suitable pairs, our immediate thought
was simply a bad pair between the CO and customer premise.  The Bell
tech insisted nothing was wrong with the cable and insisted the problem
was with our equipment.  So, just to prove otherwise, I replaced all the
equipment we had installed.  The problem was still there.  Lots of
conference calls followed and I asked Bell to place a test set at the
customer site.  I was promised this would happen.  It didn't.  The Bell
tech insisted he could do all the testing from his CO, without a test
set at the customer site.  It got to the point, where my response was
"Prove it".  All of a sudden we found out it wasn't just a bad cable
pair.  The circuit went all the way down to another town about 20 Km
away and back, through equipment that they already knew was bad and that
another customer was complaining about!  Once they fixed that, the
circuit was fine.  Incidentally, I find this sort of problem tends to be
unique with Bell.  I don't see it happening with Allstream, Telus.
Aliant etc.  I've even heard a Bell tech complain about it!

-- 
Use OpenOffice.org <http://www.openoffice.org>
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists