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

Some of you may think I am still without DSL. Nope. I had it installed from day one. Thanks for your notes of support, though.

I have found a sense of community at DSLReports, http://www.dslreports.com, which is a great site for learning about DSL. They have specific mailing lists for each DSL provider. This provides a great sense of community, as you can talk with others about issues, features, etc.

Well, on with the story . . .

OK, so if you tuned in last week you heard about my install date saga with DSL. The hardware install went ok, but alas, we weren't getting an Internet connection. We were getting a network connections, but when you tried to browse or ping onto an outside network you got nothing.

The DSL I subscribe to is called Enhanced DSL. It comes with 5 static IP addresses. This is incredible as I thought static IP addresses were so rare now you had to have them willed to you.

It's now 5:00pm, two hours into the install, and the technician is on the phone with his support people. They can't find my order and I'm not in the system. My first thought is Cha Ching. Free DSL. <grin> My second thought hovers somewhere around, "How long is this going to take" to "I want my ISDN back."

Within 90 minutes the issue is identified ... Wrong IP addresses. Southwestern Bell sends you a welcome kit after you sign up that includes your static IP addresses. Welp, mine were wrong. As soon as the technician gave me the right numbers, I could connect. When I say connect, I mean really connect.

I leapt onto ZDnet's Hotfiles site, ( http://www.hotfiles.com ), and downloaded a demo of Microsoft's latest game release, High Heat Baseball. It was over 25 megabytes in length. Of course, I asked the technician to stay to make sure my throughput was ok. Ten seconds into the download I was peaking at 85K a second throughput. Amazing. Simply amazing. After shouting out various kudos to the technician like, "You're the man" and "You've made the happiest guy in the world", our technician departed.

Sitting alone and looking at my computer I was almost overcome with emotion. I slowly realized that I had come from 300 baud, which is like .003k modems to 1200 baud, 2400 baud, 9600 baud, 14.4 baud, 28.8K, ISDN and now this. As I loaded the My Excite page I use, I quickly realized that pages no longer load, they appear. Yes, I know the speed of my loading is based on the remote server's and network connections between me and them, but come on, this is incredible.

Immersed in the pleasure of high bandwidth, I did things I could only dream about using ISDN. I watched full screen movie trailers, I downloaded programs, I listed to MP3 stereo audio and I did so much more. At one point during the evening I was getting 100K a second in downloads. YES! 100K a second! I went to bed that night thinking that my computing life was never going to be the same!

The next morning I bounded into my office to look at the news sites at high speed. Incredible. Stunning. Again, the pages popped or appeared on my screen. No interlacing as the graphics loaded. No waiting for long links to load. This is how browsing should be.

I went off to work knowing that I'd be able to brag that I could download faster at home than I could at work ....

As I arrived home, I was very anxious to download from the Internet. I had come across a few demos of management software I wanted, but waited until I got home to try them out.

My wife was the first to stop me. "Why is eBay so slow today?" My daughter nailed me at the top of the stairs. "I can't download the games I play."

I entered my office, sat down at my PC and was horrified to discover they were right. Slow loads, I mean really slow loads were occurring. Where did my popping go? Where did my fast downloads go? I was no averaging 2-4K a download. Less than a 56K modem! Way slower than my ISDN line.

Logically, I thought maybe there was something wrong with the hardware. I powered off and then on the DSL router. No go. Same throughput. I verified the IP addresses. All correct. I checked Southwestern Bell's internal system status site and found everything ok.

Bummer, I need technical support. Why bummer? Well , first off all, you have to understand that I do this networking/computing thing for a living. It is frustrating having to peel through layer and layer of support. Second, Southwestern Bell has horrible ISP support. One of my clients has an ISDN connection through Southwestern Bell and their support has been horrible. As I waited on hold, I decided to try my hand at finding out the problem. I tried pinging all my local IPs. No issues. I tried pinging the Southwestern Bell network, know issues. I tried pinging the our website, ammo! Dropped packets. I run a TRACERT and find out that my fourth hope, the one where I jump on the Internet backbone and off of the Southwestern Bell network, is causing an issue. Packets are being dropped.

Now, imagine my feeling. I've had the luxury of this great speed and now I am hobbled. Hobbled by something out of my control. I know exactly where the problem is and have a good idea of how to fix it, but I can't. Southwestern Bell's technical support is so inept and poorly staffed, it takes me until Friday to get a hold of someone who will help me.

During the three days that have passed, I've used Visual Route, ( http://www.visualroute.com ), to trace the router I am having issues with. It is a Digex router located in Maryland and is my 4th hop. Very odd, as St. Louis Southwestern Bell should be using the Chicago NAP. NAPs are access points onto the Internet backbone. There are only a few of and they are used by the major ISPs to transfer traffic.

All I needed was a static route to put me through to another NAP or internal Southwestern Bell router. Heck, I could even give them the command line Cisco command to do that. I JUST CAN'T TALK TO ANYONE.

I finally find someone in the DSL hardware repair area who will help me. She stayed on the phone with me for FIVE hours until we worked through three departments. As I finished my conversation with the last person I was assured that a ticket was open with Digex and that a status would be communicated to me. I made the technician promise to call me within 3 hours. At this point it was 5:00pm on a Friday evening. I knew that if it wasn't fixed soon, I'd be without high speed for the weekend. As I told everyone, gong through this was like the Got Milk? commercials. Someone gave me my cookies, but took away the milk . . .

Like I said, I finished the conversation with the last guy. His last promise was to call me with a status. True to his word, almost three hours later he called and let me know that A) A ticket was open with Digex, B) Southwestern Bell doesn't consider it their issue and C) There was no way for me to tell when it would be fixed. As I grew angrier and angrier I ran Visual Route again. Weird. No packet loss. Hurriedly I downloaded the same Microsoft game demo to another machine and I was back in business. The problem was fixed and has never raised it's head again. Whew!

What did I learn? The following:

DSL rocks. Get it if you want high speed access to the Internet.

Southwestern Bell support isn't prepared to handle it. Heck, all ISPs aren't ready to handle it.

Southwestern Bell's install is smooth. Yes, we had an issue with the IP addresses, but everything else went great!

When you get DSL, your Internet experience will never be the same!

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