Paul's Comments

I have said it, over and over, that I have no problem with Verizon's field people; they are, without exception, first class. They either know exactly what they're doing, or if they get in trouble, they call it in and ask for help so that they can get the job right, usually the first time. And again, they proved it.

Verizon's back office, as usual, screwed up. My Wednesday (12/17) appointment was canceled by a support person, marking the ticket as completed and fixed, without anyone coming out to fix the problem or even calling me to see if it was (it wasn't). I called back late Wednesday, to complain, discovered my trouble ticket had been cancelled, and got a Friday appointment in replacement. A technician came out and she discovered the line was crossed over with an old burglar alarm circuit. So she fixed this and it stopped causing the line to drop. And the speed went up to 512Mbps. And she even pointed out it should be higher, someone would be out to fix the line and bring it up to what it's supposed to be.

Only thing that bothers me is that now my router/firewall isn't working. I can talk to the router through its web interface if I connect to it. I can connect directly to the DSL modem, but if I connect the router to the DSL modem and connect through the router, it doesn't work, even though it did work back when I was having problems with the Internet connection. I don't like not having a firewall and (once the new Vista computer works) without a router I can't connect both computers. I have bought a switch, I think I could use that because the DSL modem also supports DHCP it might be able to handle multiple computers connected to it. I'm going to try reconnecting my router and see what happens. Another weird thing is that the DSL modem works better plugged directly into the wall socket than if it's plugged into a surge suppressor, which makes no sense. I think I'll check that next, as it's not good to have electronics running without surge suppression.

Sunday, another technician came out to fix the circuit running to the pole, and when he got finished he claimed it was the full circa 700K that I'm supposed to be getting. He runs an internal website from Verizon that says I'm getting that. But I decide to run one I think is less likely to be biased, and what do you know, I'm getting 710K download and 130K upload. (The circuit is capable of doing something like 864K but is capped to the maximum what I'm paying for 728, which is reasonable.)

Wow. I never got a 700K connection before. I have had BBC World Service radio running continuously since the connection was fixed on Sunday, and over 3 days I've not lost the connection except when I disconnected to reboot because of downloading software updates, as opposed to my old connection that always dropped for at least an hour a day and eventually was inverted and only working for one hour a day or so the last week before it was fixed. BBC only uses about 32K of bandwidth, so it's not a big piece of the service, but since it's a streaming service it's an excellent method of confirming that the connection is solid since it only has about 10 seconds of cached audio.

I went out Monday morning, and left the connection running. Monday evening I come back and the audio is still running, meaning it never dropped the connection. So it actually works and remains working. It's a nice solid service and actually works properly.

I just ran a speedtest, and I get 714/133 so it's being consistent and it works properly, exactly as it's supposed to. Verizon advertises the speed is "up to 728K" and the fact I get more than 95% of that is extremely satisfactory; the difference between what I'm getting and what the theoretical maximum I could get is so minor I don't care; it's essentially noise. As I've noted over more than twenty years: Verizon's field people are world class, Verizon's office people are worse than useless.