The internet hates me

That's the only thing that I can reasonable figure after it's tried so hard to avoid me these past two months (and succeeded).

I ordered and received my DSL modem equipment from AT&T. The equipment arrived and I had an appointment to have my dry-loop DSL turned on the next day. On that day, activation was supposed to occur by 8:00 pm, so when 8:30 rolled around I was rather curious as to why I didn't have internet yet. I called and was told to wait and see if it got activated the next day.

The next day was completely uneventful on the internet activation front, so I got back on the phone with AT&T. Again, I was told that I should wait another day.

The day after I was still completely surrounded by no internet, so I called up again and started to raise hell (after what literally amounted to two hours on hold with AT&T). I finally got connected to someone who seemed to know what he was talking about and got a new work order set up to activate the DSL line. Unfortunately, the first day that they could activate me was a full week later. Fine, I'll wait.

My new activation date arrived - a Friday - and lo-and-behold I still have no DSL. Who could have guessed? So, in a fit of desperation and vodka-&-O.J. I called up Comcast. After explaining my situation to a customer service rep (leaving out the part about my massively-read blog posting regarding how much I hate Comcast - 5!), I begged her to have someone come out to my apartment the next day and fix my Comcast internet. I told her that if Comcast would fix my internet that Saturday, I would stay with them. Regrettably, she informed me that they didn't have any appointments available on Saturday. Even more regrettably, I informed her that she couldn't help me and that I wanted to be escalated to a supervisor.

After explaining my story to the supervisor, he somehow found me a Saturday appointment between 10:00 am and 1:00 pm (funny how that just came out of nowhere). Hooray. Now, I've been stood up by Comcast before, recently, and it still hurts so I made sure that they noted to the tech to call me when he arrived at my building. All I had to do was wait.

The next morning, I woke up around 8:30 am. At 9:00 am, Comcast dispatch called me and said that they had a tech in my area that might be able to be to my place before 10, if I wouldn't mind. I told them that that would be preferable. No promises were made, but I took this as a hopeful sign that my internet would be fixed earlier in the day, rather than later.

1:00 pm arrived with a total of zero Comcast techs. Back to the phone line I went. Dispatch told me that the tech was running late (clearly) and that he was scheduled to be to my place by 2:15.

He arrived at 2:30. I would normally have been pissed, but I was just ecstatic to see him there!

He was relatively normal, personable, and knowledgeable. The first thing that he did was find our junction box, replace the splitter, and re-crimp some ends... and the internet was fixed! All of the packet loss that I was seeing cleared up and I had solidly connected internet. Perfect! He even hooked me up with a new remote for our cable box and a new length of coax cable so I could move my cable modem to my desk (which is on the other side of the room).

The tech left and things were great! I very carefully routed the new coax and set up the cable modem on my desk, being careful to monitor my connectivity as I did so (adding more cable adds more potential for interference, which could once again ruin my connection). Everything was great and as of 4:00 pm I had perfect internet. I left Ping Plotter running just to monitor the situation and we went out to run some errands.

We returned about 3 hours later and the internet was still perfect. Oh happy day! I started playing some online games that I had been waiting almost two months to play. About two hours in, I started getting disconnected over and over. Upon investigation, I discovered that the intermittent internet connection had mysteriously returned. Drats! I was too tired to worry about it Saturday night, so I left it for Sunday morning.

Sunday morning, I woke up and decided to fix the internet if it was the last thing I did. The first step was to open up the junction box that the tech had replaced. I did, pulled out the splitter and looked at it. It looked like a splitter. I wasn't really sure what I was trying to do but whatever it was didn’t fix the internet.

Then I realized that the splitter only split once (two outputs from one input), but we have three outlets in the apartment. There had to be another splitter! I couldn't find another blank panel that might house a junction box anywhere in the apartment, though. I decided to take apart the panel on the wall where my cable modem connects, hoping I might be able to ascertain which direction the wire came from. That turned out to be pointless because behind that panel, I found the junction box that I was looking for as well as an extremely janky looking splitter.

Within 5 minutes I had the splitter removed and replaced with a pass-through connector (we don't even use the outlet that it splits to anyway, so losing that isn't an issue for us) and my internet was perfect. It's now been two days and it's remained that way. Thank god. I can now play all the games I want and surf as much as I want without disconnects or anything.

I still need to call up AT&T and break up with them. I don't think that relationship is going to be too difficult to end though, since I doubt they even knew we were dating. It was a very one-sided affair. I thought they were going to be my knight in shining armor, but it turned out that they were just as abusive to me as Comcast. At least Comcast has faster service.

EDIT: After I got home last night, things started acting up again. Grrr....