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The only reason that I have a landline is for DSL so about six weeks ago I call up the folks at SBC and start cancelling voice services with the intent of reducing my monthly expences. After I have cancelled everything except for dial tone the CSR asks if I would be interested in upgrading my DSL service to 1.5-3.0 for about $5.00 less than what I'm paying for 385-1.5. Being the intelligent young man that I am, I took her up on it. Since this was late on a Friday after noon none of this would take affect until the following Monday.

Monday evening I come in from work to find that I had no DSL. Not only that, I had no dial tone and to top it off all of the fine folks at SBC had gone home for the evening. On Tuesday I call and open a trouble ticket and on Wednesday I find out the local CO dropped my loop. I had been unplugged.

Now that I was up and running I went to several different speed test sites and they all showed that I was running at 2.0+. Life was sweet, until I lost the connection. I reboot everything, nothing. Shut everything down, reset my router, check connections, no luck.

I leave everything on and about an hour later I decide to mess with it again. The first thing I do is launch FireFox and to my suprise I connect.

After about 10 days of this non-sense I call and open a ticket. The line tech tells me that he can see no trouble on the line but my problem is most likely because I'm too far from the CO (about 9,000 wire feet) for the higher speed so I ask him to roll me back to the slower speed. A service tech out of the local office is scheduled to come out and take a look at the line and the equipment here at the apartment complex. While he is here he comes to my place and looks at my equipment and finds nothing wrong and can offer no explination as to why I'm having trouble.

Rolling me back to the slower speed did not solve the on-again-off-again service. In fact, it has gotten worse. Before I opted for the upgrade I never had anything less than 1.12 down. Now I'm lucky to get 330, that is until the connection is dropped.

I don't beleive that the problem is on my end. With no action on my part (no reboot or power down and back up of anything) the service comes back after about 10 minutes. It can't be the NIC in my pc's, unless all 3 of them went bad at the same time. I know it's not my router because I replaced it and I know it's not the DSL modem because I have borrowed a friends that they are currently using.

I got this sent up to Tier 2. When the Tier 2 tech asked me if I had my phone line plugged into the port that my broadband cable should be plugged into, I switched to Cox and you can go over to the Cox forum and see how much fun I'm having with them.

Is anyone else having as much fun with either of these folks as I am?