Written By: Patrick Grote
Date: July 17, 2003 (Previously published)
Section: Viewpoints

I've had a 128K ISDN connection for the last two years. It's dial-up and costs me $110.00 a month. Add a $49.95 a month ISP fee for unlimited access and you have $159.95 per month. For the last six months I have seen the cable and DSL ads tout their fast service.

Intrigued, I did more research. With cable I found that the speeds were blazing and the price was low, but the downsides were just too great for me. For one, I had to share this bandwidth with those in my neighborhood. See, cable is like one big local area network. The more people on, the less your bandwidth goes. Second, I didn't like the fact others could see the traffic going across the network. Yep, leave it to some young geek to take a sniffer or something to the connection and read packets. Third, I really hate my cable company. I mean I hate them. My cable is sort of reliable, but the customer service is absolutley horrible. I could imagine my cable going out for 48 hours along with my internet access. I'd go through withdrawl.

As I looked into DSL, I liked what I saw. The bandwidth is your own. You don't share it with anyone. There are minimum commitments that the provider must meet. The installation is almost as easy as cable. You are required to use what the provider calls a modem, which can also be a router. At $79.95/month, it was more expensive than the cable plan at $39.95/month, but it had three distinct advantages I liked:

The bandwidth was my own and went up to T1 speeds.

Static IPs! Rather than having dynamic IPs assigned each time I connected, the provider would give me 5 static IPs. These are like gold and would allow each of my main machines in the house to be connected to the internet.

It was geeky cool. I don't do much in the way of the unknown nowadays and this was definitley saying goodbye.

The last thing I had to do was choose a provider. In the St. Louis area there are three primary providers. I chose Southwestern Bell as I figured they were the folks who ultimatley support the system anyway. Also, they would supply me with 5 static IPs, the router and installation for a very low price as long as I committed to two years of service. Having just done this with ISDN, I didn't think it would be a big deal.

The timing of all this was odd. I had to disconnect my ISDN line a week before DSL was due to be installed. During this time I connected to the internet through the 56K modem in my notebook. Can you say horrible? I don't know how people can connect at speeds like that. I found myself gravitating to the sites that used graphics sparingly, Yahoo and CNN, and avoiding high graphics sites like AltaVist and ABCNews.

While waiting for the installation day to come, Southwestern Bell shipped me my DSL "modem", cables and some weird looking devices that plugged into my modular jacks. Since I didn't do any pre-research on how DSL works, I was mystified. I didn't want to go look it up online, as I knew it would make me more impatient. I'd heard horror stories concerning the delays in installation and didn't want to get too excited. In the mail the following day came the piece of paper that was my official membership card into the internet elite -- my own IP addresses. Although there were only five, I felt very important. It was now official, the Grote family would be on the net.

The day came to install DSL and I worked from home. Southwestern Bell had called the previous Friday to confirm the appointment on Monday. They told us to be at home from 8:00am to 5:00pm. In the age of Internet, DSL and high powered computing, you'd think they'd come up with a way to narrow that schedule.

As the hours rolled away, I busily cleaned my office in anticipation. I moved the printer stand that had long since cloaked my ISDN jack in darkness. This got me thinking about the installation time. If they are running new wires it may take a while. I could suggest they use the ISDN lines ... As my excitement grew, I broke open the box Southwestern Bell sent me. I hooked up my router to the power and my Ethernet hub. Hmmm, no activity light on the Ethernet. I tried a straight through cable and it worked. Maybe I do know something about this DSL stuff.

10:00am -- No DSL guy. 12:00pm got some lunch and day dreamed about the speed. No DSL guy. 1:00pm starting to get nervous. 2:00pm fretting all about. My wife called Southwestern Bell who assured her we were on the schedule still. 3:00pm and I am as excited as a 6 year old on Christmas day. I decided to sit on the living room couch, which faces the front door, and wait for the knock. I drift asleep and no sooner do I start to dream about my high speed hijinks than the dogs bark. YES! The DSL guy has arrived.

The DSL guy was in his mid-20s. We made short conversation about how busy they were and we were off to my office. I showed him where I was going to install the router. He kept calling it a modem. He then asked if I had the filters they sent. Filters? Oh, yeah, those modular jack plug things. That is when it hit me. DSL uses your existing copper wiring. Your own home phone line. The filters do just that. They filter out the data traffic from your voice traffic. Now it made all the sense in the world. No wonder it is distance sensitive.

I hurridely fetched the filters for him. He indicated that he would have to place on on each jack in the house. My wife immediately became concerned. We have a quaint old rotery phone that is wall mounted downstairs. She was objecting. I was at the point of insanity imagining the DSL guy saying something like, "Gee, I don't do rotary" or "We'll have to delay installation for a week." Instead of my worse fears coming to fruition, the DSL guy sais he could filter the traffic from the demarc. Cool. We showed him where the lines came in and he went to work. To be honest, I didn't watch. I was too excited. About twenty minutes later he came up to say he had finished. Wow, 30 minutes into this and we're almost done! ISDN had taken six hours!

The DSL guy then connected the DSL cable to the home phone jack in my office and blammo, we had a DSL light! In preparation for the install, I had preconfigured each of my machines with the IP addresses given to me by Southwestern Bell. All a twitter, I clicked on IE and got the dreaded cannot find message. EGADS!

We checked the modem/router and all looked well. It was seeing the Ethernet traffic, but the ATM light wasn't blinking. The DSL guy told me that typically the ATM and Ethernet lights blink together.

The DSL guy went to his truck to get his laptop. It was a pretty nice Compaq notebook running NT 4.0. He plugged in my IP information and connected directly to the modem/router. No go.

We looked at each other and shrugged. All looked well, but we couldn't connect. I gave him the resume speil about my being an MCSE, working in networks and working for MCIWorldCom. He threw me a blank look. I then explained to him that the hardware looks ok, so it must be a configuration issue. I pressed to find out how the modem/router gets its IP address. To me, this seemed to be the issue. I could ping all my local machines, but couldn't ping the default gateway, the router/modem. He threw me a blank look.

Nice guy he was, no network genius though. He pulled out his support sheet and began calling for help. By this time it was 4:30pm and we were in the 90 minute portion of the install. I left the room when I overheard him respond shockingly to the person on the phone, "You can't find his order?"

So close, but yet so far ...

Bookmark/Search this post with:
delicious | digg | reddit | furl | technorati | icerocket