Offline Again

Just a quick note to observe that Verizon has managed to fumble my home Internet connection again. I'm posting this from work. We lost connectivity sometime Tuesday night, and haven't got it back yet. So...

• Major outage when they insisted that I had to be switched from Frame Relay to ATM, for "reliability"


• Outage for several days to replace a DSL modem that I'd had for less than a year.


• Now an outage which the tech took an hour to diagnose (ending in the winning quote "you don't have Internet access"). To be fair, I think he meant that there was a connection, just no TCP/IP stack, since he could see my DSL modem from his office, and I could see it from my computer, so theoretically there's an end-to-end connection...

Guess Kevin J. Martin is doing his job guaranteeing that the free market gives us the best possible broadband choices.

Update

The "Central Office" called yesterday to say that the problem was fixed. Of course it wasn't. Jean was home yesterday, and she called tech support again, did the hour-long diagnostic two-step, and finally got the answer, "your modem is failing." Again. After it was replaced seven months ago. Maybe if Verizon put a little more quality into their equipment, they wouldn't have to spend so much money on tech support.

Anyway, they're shipping us a replacement, which will probably arrive sometime next week. Only then will we see if the diagnosis is correct this time...

Update Two

And, we're back. Got the new DSL modem, hooked it up, configured it, and encountered the annoying redirect to Verizon portal page. This has happened each time I've had a major problem. Just when I think I'm done, I have to call Verizon tech support again to have them walk me through the secret backdoor to turn off the stupid redirect. I think I know how to do it myself now, but it's just damned annoying that they put hurdle after hurdle in your way for a product you've paid for.

Anyway, hi alls!