Just need to vent...

Wow.
Somebody out there still has copper?
Most 'landline' customers are riding glass to the prem and their home number is a VOIP.
There's a reason for this.
POTS is regulated.
VOIP isn't, and copper is loads more expensive to maintain than glass is.
Before last week I would have also said that fiber has the added advantage of not being attractive for thieves wanting to melt it down and sell it for scrap.
BUT.....
I was called out one night recently on a fiber failure involving two cell towers.
As soon as I heard the address, I turned off the truck without leaving the office and referred the trouble to cable repair - because I knew what had to have happened.
Copper thieves at 0-dark-thirty removed a section of aerial fiber, struggled to get it into a truck or (more likely) onto a trailer undetected, and took it to a non-disclosed location so that they could begin melting it down.

I just wish I could have been there when they realized that there was no copper in the cable.....

Every now and again somebody will gleefully tell me that they're never giving my blankety-blank employer another dime of their hard earned money because they're switching to one of our "competitors" vastly superior service.

Works for me.
Their competitors are some of our best customers.

 

Yes, I get fiber solicitations but my cable modem service remains affordable

• Original 30 mbs grew to 75 mbs today - a former data network engineer, more than enough
• Owned cable modem keeps working

Bob Wilson

 

Whereas, when my landline provider finally hobbled and down-QoS'ed my DSL strongly enough to induce me to move to glass and schedule the installation ...

... they belatedly discovered that they didn't really have glass available on my street. Database error. Sorry! Here is your refund for that pre-paid installation. And we've updated your account to adjust the maximum available internet speed down from GigaBit, to just 3 Mbps. (I had been 'enjoying' a solid and perfectly reliable 4.5 Mbps only months earlier.)

So, bye-bye landline. Now I'm enjoying a big upgrade to the cable company that so many other people already hated. And a 'landline' phone number now assigned to a device that can travel with us.

Umm, any chance we are speaking of the same company? Just in different geographies?

 

Nope.
The PNDubbs isn't one of ours, but telecommunications is telecommunications which means mainly, it isn't.
If you have copper and you're fed up with it AND the company that provides you with your 3MB/s then by all means!!!!!.....Cancel your service. Just don't fool yourself into thinking that you're costing them money because as I tap this out in the front half of 2024, nothing could be further from the truth!!!!
I have copper AND glass.
My copper comes from Spectrum, and they're pretty dern reliable.
I've only had a few short term outages in the last 3-4 tears and I have something like 300mb/s service on coax for probably $65/mo
My actual residence has 1gb/s glass from Big Bell and it's been 100% reliable for 2-3 years now.
The prices are all pretty much the same for the exact same reason that all streaming services are just about the same.
If you know why?
You know why.

With Fiber?
Not. One. Issue.
None.
The service is rock solid, and lightning fast.
I do not say this as a shill for ANY company, but rather as an Electronics Tech.
I truly wish it were otherwise, because much of my daily work is because of copper.
UNFORTUNATELY, the laws of physics doesn't care.
Glass doesn't conduct electricity.
It doesn't suffer from corrosion.
People SELDOM steal glass - especially when it's buried.
It's easy to repair, AND it seems to be infinitely scalable.
The SAME .0085mm hunk of glass seems to be able to handle speeds from sub mb/s all the way through tb/s.
The only problem we have with our giga-whammy service is that people try to test it with equipment that isn't rated for gigabit speeds.
Example:
Doing a speed test with your phone or over ethernet with an older PC.
(Your speeds will never be as fast over Wi-Fi as they are over a wired connection.)


When I worked for Uncle, I always used to say that any third grader could to do oceanography if seawater didn't conduct electricity.
It would seem that modern communications bears my theory out.

75mb/s is enough for ANYONE who doesn't have a teenager in the house.
You can stream high-definition videos, do online gaming, video conferencing, and just about any web browsing.
People who buy internet service based on advertised throughput are the same type that buy cars based solely on 0-60 times (or MPGs)
They pretty much get that they deserve....

One of the better reasons for getting cable.
YOU pick the modem AND the access point (often miscalled a router.)
If you're into gaming or IoT, this is a very nontrivial bennie.

Also, it's more economical.
If you keep your service for more than a year, buying even a budget modem will be more cost effective.

 

there aren't enough chaise lounges at the pool when it gets busy here at the resort

 

Cancelled at the end of 2020.

In nearly two decades of ADSL service (two ISPs, but no actual change in the last copper mile), I never detected any loss of signal or service. If any loss happened, it was courteous enough to schedule its downtime to not inconvenience us.

Then the Pandemic arrived, and it started dropping the signal almost hourly.

 

In Florida every hillbilly in a pickup blocks the left lane with the stated belief system that he has every right to go as slow as he wants in any lane he wants. Then he points to the right and exclaims "if u don't like it go round me" the same hillbilly refers to his passenger vehicle as a "truck" and drapes his heavy unfit arm atop the wheel like he's a big shot. He further justifies his impedance to traffic saying "you don't need to be going that fast anyway" welcome to Florida.... where we run into rolling roadblocks created by three lanes of slow drivers a mile aheadnwho can't safely change lanes and won't admit to their ineptness.

Hate to break it to you rednecks, a truck has airbrakes, weighs over 26k lbs, requires a CDL. What you poor boy bought is a passenger vehicle that guzzles gas and goes slow in the left lane to eek out 11.5mpg. blocking traffic might make u feel impotent for a little while, but your broke uneducated arse looks dumb to me.

 

Judge much?
btw...
22mpg....and it has disc brakes, and I actually have a rusty hitch ball.

If you know why, you know why.

Most of the people I encounter in the left hand lane are self-important types that think that their time is more important than other people's safety and think that it is their GOD given right to drive at PSL +30.
Occasionally I will encounter left-lane jerks, but these are usually present in populated areas where traffic densities do not allow for the left lane to be the rightful property of people who wish to speed.
When I'm in a traffic dense area, I drive in the right lane.
Since I'm aware that it's as much a violation of the law to drive recklessly as it is to be in the left hand lane except for passing, I seldom worry about either types of a**holes.

We pay State Troopers to deal with them.

 

I have a fee on my mortgage going back aways. I've missed it cause I've gone paperless, use autopay, and there is no notice on the account's home screen. I only noticed it when I went to pay off some principle, and got a message about there being fee. There is no way of paying the fee through the online portal, just monthly payment, additional principle, or additional escrow. Filed a question about how I'm suppose to pay this fee. Got an email about them looking into it, and about a week later a hard copy came in the mail saying the same.

 

I paid a slightly higher rate for a local (regional) lender for a VA loan.
Somehow even though, like a student loan, it's U.S. government backed I am actually expected to pay it back with my own money.

My CFO is able to make payments on the principle and handle anything else locally.
If we were to ever have a problem, I work two blocks from the local branch and I can be sitting across the desk from the branch manager inside of 15 minutes. I'm blessed because even though I bought my second home late in life, I did so at the bottom of the market before the recent near doubling of home prices and interest rates.
My intentions are to have it payed off a year or two before I retire - and being able to make additional payments makes for easy math.

 

Autocorrect? Typo? Slip?

My landline provider's technician isn't here yet (strictly speaking, I can't complain: after all, the "appointment" is for "between 8 and 5").

But I gleaned a little more of the story on Friday in a chance conversation with my neighbor down the block.

Her landline had been out the week before (see, I'm not the only one still on copper!), and had just been restored ... last Monday morning, at the time mine went out.

Her tech had climbed down from the pole and said "got yours working again, and also weeded out a bunch of older connections to these other houses that don't use 'em anymore."

 

Knuckeheads going slow in the left "fast" lane is bull!

I'm not a bumper sticker fan, but saw one that reminds me of this, "If I passed you on the right, you're an idiot!!"

 

"or anticipating a left turn or exit ahead", but nobody makes bumper stickers that wide.

 

An offside pass is a strong indicator of two idiots on the road, round these parts...

Friday morning I was taking my daughter to daycare when somebody coming the other way crossed the double yellow line to pass a garbage truck doing its appointed rounds.

So I found myself nose to nose with somebody accelerating, with an angry look on her face, driving the wrong way on a state highway, and even transiting an attended crosswalk to do this.

 

At one time, we had DSL service over the land line. But every time it rained, it disappeared. Turned out, water was collecting in the overhead lines. But I could call the phone company to complain over the same wires.

Bob Wilson

 

A few times it worked for me the exact opposite way. My phone would stop working, and I would go online over the still-working DSL and report it.

They would send somebody out who would climb the pole and reattach one side of the pair.

I guess the frequencies used by DSL still propagated well enough over a single copper conductor even when the other wire in the pair had come undone.

However, it seems neither the phone nor DSL will work if an overzealous tech goes up the pole and weeds out 'unused' connections.

Edit: tech has arrived. Cable meter reports an open 153 feet from my house, which seems a lot like the pole where last week's tech was....

Edit again: he has gone up the pole, and unwrapped where all the junctions are, and confirmed it looks like the previous tech just wholesale dyked out a whole bunch of the drops on my block.

Now ... he can easily tell which service drop is mine (put a tone generator on it before going up the pole), but is painstakingly using the minimal equipment they sent him out with to identify the right pair to reconnect it to.

 

In my home states, passing on the right is quite legal when done in a separate marked lane. Not so much when done in the same lane or on the shoulder. As long as left-hand exits and turns remain prevalent, it seems a necessity, but also prevents left lane campers from technically being rolling roadblocks.

Here, reckless driving is a vastly more serious violation than left lane camping. The later seems to be just a $136 infraction, with about 14,000 citations issued annually in this state just before the Pandemic-era traffic de-enforcement arrived. Reckless driving is a gross misdemeanor, with penalties 'up to' $5000 fine and a year in jail.

 

That is true in MOST parts, although I will admit to having passed idiots who were on mental vacation in the left hand lane - but nearly always in places where you can see two mile markers at the same time
Book readers or movie watchers are still my favorite impaired driver.
I've had people go active on me IN THIS FORUM for 'not understanding' why watching a movie or reading a newspaper while driving isn't WORSE than drunk driving.

Context.
-or perhaps my hyperbolic thinking did not lend itself to proper interpretation.
Posting in an on-line forum is a poor medium for exchange.

I would suspect that reckless driving is a 'vastly more serious' violation of the law than 'buffering in the left lane" is in 52/52 states.
My point was that it's OK to judge or missjudge.
HOWEVER (comma!!!)
SOMETIMES the latter leads to unfortunate consequences.

Perhaps we can agree on this:

If you're in the left lane and not actively passing somebody in the right hand lane, there is a very good possibility that you are breaking the law.
If you're in the right lane and you are passing somebody in the left lane, there is a very good possibility that you are breaking the law.

If you have the authority to arrest people in the locale in which this alleged infraction takes place, you MIGHT want to intervene.

OR?
MAYBE NOT!!!
America is not as friendly to their LEOs as they have been in the past.

Otherwise?
GET OVER yourself, and continue on to your destination, safely and perhaps not violating as many laws as the person that you are interacting with.......

 

My vent is about AT&T's methods used to persuade DSL customers to abandon copper.

TLDR: AT&T no longer supports DSL service. They disconnected my DSL without warning and forced me to a new service (and contract )after wasting several weeks of my time and theirs.

Background: My DSL worked well for over 25 years. The contract with AT&T had no restrictions on it's use. I could even share it with my neighbors! I provided the cable modem and maintained it myself. My cable broadband, on the other hand, prohibited using the cable for any kind of mail, web or monitoring service. I configured it such that I had complete control over the mail, DNS and web servers. By controlling those services I was able to make sure that the bad guys were not spoofing the DNS records or trying to sneak viruses into emails.

Last October my DSL went down, and nothing I did would bring it back to life. They found a flooded sidewalk vault. They found bad splices. They found "noise on the line". After many weeks of investigating, AT&T isolated the problem to a wrongly configured port at the central office. It had a password mismatch of the PPPoE protocol. For the last 20 years the network had never been configured to use PPPoE.

The worst part of this deliberate outage was that I could not use my personal mail servers to respond to the two factor identification that everyone used to validate my requests to change my service to new providers. Virtually all of my emails bounced after the second week of the outage. My web server, which had been configured to detect network changes and log them was no longer of use.

After more than a month of screwing around with the DSL, One of the AT&T 2nd tier support techs finally admitted that they were no longer supporting ADSL. My line was probably torn out as part of an equipment consolidation of some sort.

It took 4 people another month to install a new fiber based broadband. No more unlimited use. No static address. And it's using AT&T's hardware in my garage. Sigh.

On the positive side, all my privately configured hardware has been dismantled and replaced with stock equipment from AT&T, Comcast and Verizon. The home automation software that I created nearly 30 years ago has been retired and Amazon's echo has taken it's place. No one can complain about my home brewed designs anymore. Now they want me to alter ALEXA to do what my software used to do for them.

Even the AT&T techs should have no problem getting their 100% compliant service back online.