How hard is it to keep a DSL Circuit up?
I have had nothing but problems with my DSL line since Monday. The basic pattern is like this: the line will stay up for anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes, lose connectivity, then spend a couple of minutes re-establishing connectivity. Repeat and curse. Lots of errors incrementing in the modem logs, and at least three confused Qwest techs visting my house.
Before the Qwest techs visited my place and started “cleaning up the lines,” I stumbled on a “workaround” that confused the crap out of everyone I explained it to. I have DSL coming in on a pair of wires that terminates up in my wiring closet. A single jack from one of my patch panels goes straight into the DSL modem. I have an analog phone plugged into the back of the DSL modem. No other jacks in the house utilize this line. So it looks like:
Patch Panel -> DSL Modem -> Analog Phone
When I was resigned to living on dialup and hooking my wife’s computer downstairs up to utilize the analog portion of my DSL line, I had put a splitter between the Patch Panel and my DSL modem. So now it looked like:
Patch Panel ——> DSL Modem -> Analog Phone | —> Patch panel to wife’s computerAside from the extra “DSL” noise on the line, my wife’s modem worked well. What was scarier is that it caused the DSL Circuit to stay up! I did several experiments removing the splitter and putting it back in and sure enough the DSL Circuit stayed up.
Since Qwest has come out and fixed all the crossed wires and removed the bridge taps, this workaround does not appear to be “as” successful. It seems the DSL circuit stays up a little longer this way: long enough for me to do a few non-interactive things like write a blog post, but makes it really annoying to do anything like make calls over VoIP. Fortunately, it’s a slow week at work with everyone being gone for the holiday season, so it’s not the end of the world that I am available at limited capacity. However, it’s damn annoying–annoying enough that I’m looking at the cable company offerings again.
Qwest is gonna come out for the third day in a row tomorrow afternoon to see if they can figure out what is going on.
