Scribbled by Matt Wilkinson

I had several client calls these past couple of weeks related to DSL outages from SBC Yahoo. On Monday, Dec. 13, I got a call that DSL was down in an office I support. Power cycling the Netopia DSL Router didn’t help. A call to the SBC DSL support line revealed there was a widespread outage in the Chicago area. I figured we’d give SBC overnight to get their stuff together.

The next day, my clients told me the service was up and down, mostly down. So I came to the office and signed into the router. Sure enough, it couldn’t establish a connection for than a minute before losing it. I called the DSL support line again, and they informed me service had been restored, and they were seeing some kind of line problems specific to our line. Next step was to schedule for a technician to check things out on-site.

By Wednesday, the natives were getting restless. I arrived at the office and saw a green LED on the WAN port on the router. Hoorah! I almost didn’t bother to test things. I’m glad I did. I had service, but it was SLOW (200k down), and this client was paying for the faster business class DSL service (3mb+ down, 384k up, static IP). The router status page indicated speed parameters which I knew to be incorrect (these aren’t actually measures, more like what you are currently provisioned for). I called once more to the nice people in the far away land and told them they have us provisioned wrong. That was a waste of time, they just kept telling me what they are scripted to tell every customer — “Reboot your PC, power cycle your modem”.

The SBC technician finally arrives. He does some line tests, and reports no issues with the lines. I point out the speed settings on the router, and he quickly agreed that indicated a provisioning problem. He made a call, and they cranked up the bandwidth to what it should have been, and within moments, things were humming along nicely. But to take three days to get service fully restored is crazy. I’m running a line monitor from dslreports.com to keep tabs on the router. So far, so good.