cellio | DSL

Ah, what a joy. I have cast out the demons of stupidity (that would be Verizon) in favor of Telerama. The installation was nearly painless, the pain involved was a problem at our end (not theirs), and the tech-support people (who answer 24 hours a day, by the way) were cheerful, helpful, and not clueless bozos like the guys over at Verizon. (I almost wrote "Luddites", but they obviously don't reject technology wholesale. It provides them an income, after all.)

For reasons too stupid to go into, we have two phone lines in our house and the DSL was coming in on the second line (not our main voice line with the published number). We've been wanting to fix that for a while. I've also become unhappy with Verizon, so we decided to set up service on the main line with a different provider and then, once that worked, kill the Verizon service and the second line. Our only previous experience with setting up DSL was with Verizon, and it took a month or so to get it working, so we wanted a buffer during which we could fall back on Verizon.

We got email Friday from Telerama saying we were ready to go. I didn't have time to do anything about it before Shabbat, so I tackled it today. The jack with the second line (and Verizon service) had, plugged into it, a two-in-one gizmo supporting both the modem and a phone. So I took that, moved it to the jack for the main line -- and watched the modem fail to make a connection. I was pretty sure that the Linksys box, now incorrectly configured with a Verizon fixed IP address on a Telerama line, was not relevant, but I changed it to use dynamic settings just in case. No change. The email from Telerama had said to call them to complete the setup, so I thought perhaps there was some final switch to flip at their end. Meanwhile, I had a nagging feeling: when we set up the Verizon DSL (in 1999), they had first required us to do something to the phone line to install a "splitter". (This was the most technical description they were able to provide.) We certainly never had anything like that done to the main line, so I thought that might be the problem even though the Telerama DSL info never mentioned such a requirement.

So I called Telerama (no hold time!) and the nice person there told me that the service should be working and splitters were no longer required. I described the state of the modem and she confirmed what I had guessed: the modem was failing its initial handshake. She said this was probably a phone-wiring problem and that she'd need to send a technician out to look at it on Monday. (Another bonus: Telerama can send people out in the evenings, until around 9pm; Verizon schedules service calls M-F 8:30am-5pm and won't get more specific than "morning" or "afternoon". And Telerama offered next-day service; Verizon can make you wait a week or more.)

A few minutes later, I thought to investigate that two-in-one gadget more closely. (I should have done this earlier.) I've used such things in the past, to plug an old-style modem and a phone into the same jack. That's what I thought I had here. This is not what it was; the two sides were labelled differently. So I unplugged the modem and plugged it straight into the Telerama jack. Voila: the modem found the network.

So I called back and apologized, and then we needed to do some configuration. (This service has a fixed IP address.) I said "I have a LinkSys box and a LAN and I'm looking at the LinkSys configuration; are you ok with that?" Sure, she said, no problem at all. Verizon will not even talk to you if they think you have anything other than a modem plugged directly into a computer running Win95/98/2000. She gave me the new IP address, DNS servers, and gateway, I tried some pings to verify, and all was fine. She volunteered that she could not ping me, and I said that's because of the firewall and it's not likely to be a problem with the service. Half the Verizon guys I've talked to over the years didn't know the word "ping", let alone doing it unasked.

So far, Telerama rocks!

DSL

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