Thu. Sep 04, 2003
The Internet®, Now 60% Faster!
The Internet®, Now 60% Faster! – The other day I mentioned my recent Technical Trauma. Over the holiday weekend, when I went to check e-mail, Susan turned her head on the couch with a look of irritated disgust, and then said, “Oh … I haven’t heard that sound in a long time.”
That nasty sound. “eeeeeORRRReeeeORRRR, SchsssssSSSSSSSSSS” like some kind of distressed electric donkey (hey, now there’s a band name … “Ben Weasel and The Electric Donkeys”). I first had DSL installed 4 years ago this month, have become royally spoiled, and do not suffer dial up well. At all. Even the sound of the modem is depressive.
Today was the day of my scheduled visit by a BellSouth tech to check the line. I got up worrying about the worst. I remembered how they originally tested the line length to the CO (the “Central Office,” where the DSL modem bank is located), and it came up as just shy of 13,000 feet. A couple of years ago, something happened to the line conditions that required putting a “noise profile” on my DSL connection, and when they tested the line length again, it had grown to just over 14,000 feet.
How can that be? Was it a youthful line that had simply grown with age, or did the wind stretch it over time (a few inches between each set of poles … it could add up)? Nonetheless, since many providers set 15,000 feet as the cutoff point for providing service, I was worried that today the tech would report, “well, no wonder your DSL doesn’t work, Sparky, you’re 47 miles from the CO!”
About 11:30, the tech calls and says he’s got things fixed up and I shouldn’t have any further trouble. I look over, and sure enough, there’s a green synch light on my modem for the first time in days. When I ask him what the problem was, he wasn’t very specific, but he said, “there was some trouble on that line to the CO, so I just put you on another line to a remote.”
I asked, “A remote DSLAM, closer than the CO? Where is it?” “You know where Corporate Square is?” “Yeah, it’s right across the street.” [obviously it had been added long after my 4 year old connection was established] “You mean instead of a 14,000 foot line to the CO, I now have a direct connection of less than 1,000 feet? “Yep”
[with great smiling emphasis] “Thank you very much, sir.”
So I rebooted the router, and did my usual test download. When I was connected to the distant CO, a browser download from Mozilla.org came in at about 90 KB per second, or roughly one megabyte every 11 seconds. With the new connection to the closer remote, download speed is 145 KB per second, or roughly one megabyte every 7 seconds. 60% faster.
Now that’s how you fix a connection. And make a speed addicted customer happy once again.
Published 08:44PM, Thu, Sep 04 2003
Category: My Life
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Peanut Gallery
That's kind of scary to think about, as they were able to establish synch during troubleshooting by send an extremely low speed synch test down the line, so slow they claimed it would only handle the overhead of the connection itself, not any added activity. I suppose with enough time and work investment, they could have massaged it up to twice modem speed (which is, of course, just fast enough to piss me off). But, thankfully, human nature prevailed. The Man On The Scene saw that the quickest and easiest solution was to switch to another available DSL connection. And Corporate Square is a large office complex (i.e., lots of potential customers for the much higher priced business DSL), so I likely now have the cheapest connection in that box. The fact it was immediately before lunch time may have worked in my favor as well.
Or, "Ben Weasel and The Distressed Electric Donkey"
I thought about that, but it just seemed slightly wordy. I've been waiting for Ben to come forward and offer his opinion. Apparently, he has better things to do...
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Way to go! They don't care about your speed problems as long as your ADSL is at the minimum, twice as fast as dialup. But give them a dead connection and they jump to make the problem go away as quickly as possible. Probably the easiest solution was to give you one of the (potentially) few open ports in your local remote. My remote is almost 4000 ft. away, so you're probably downloading MSBlasters and Sobigs slightly faster than I am. It's a pain hauling them in over a modem.