I am the broadband Bermuda Triangle

[Wayne Baisley]

Good read, Mike.  I've forwarded it to several friends who had their 
eXcitement at home curtailed Saturday morning.  One of them says that 
she's still disconnected, even though AT&T claimed things were 97% 
restored.  She's not enjoying her 3% status right now.  Your story did 
cheer her up.  She's printing it out at work so she can show it to her 
husband at home.

My experience has been roughly the opposite.  I signed up with Telocity 
over a year ago, and until 2 weeks ago was happily chirping along with 
416 Kbps of SDSL bandwidth on Rhythms' network, at 15,000+ feet from the 
CO.  Telocity got bought by DirecTV, who warned me that Rhythms would 
implode by September 5th, but apparently WorldCom was taking over pieces 
of the network and my connection never hiccuped.  Well, no more than 
usual, but rebooting the gateway box fixes that.

Two weeks ago I switched to MegaPath and Covad, which dropped me down to 
384 Kbps, but gave me 8 static IP addresses.  So far no hiccups.  And in 
both cases, the Ameritech folks came out earlier than expected/promised. 
  They even had to go out of their way to find unused pairs between our 
local junction and the next one upstream.  For a while there I had all 4 
pairs in use.  Two phones, two DSLs.

And since we just had the siding replaced, I redid the cabling inside. 
It had been 4-wire run outside to the upstairs rooms.  I now have a dual 
  star of Cat5e (I'm gigabit-ready!) everywhere.  This will make it 
easier to cope with having to move the computers downstairs when the 
bathrooms get redone next month.  And in the whole process I only put my 
foot through the ceiling once.  Yes, I suppose I could've gone wireless, 
but where's the fun in that?  You can't even justify buying a punchdown 
tool.

Cheers,
Wayne

Fat, dumb and happy beats fat, dumb and unhappy.