Monica

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.)

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Well, maybe tonight I'll be able to figure out what's wrong with the damned network connection. Off I go... (It's got to be between the modem and the outside world, and thus Verizon's problem. But the modem itself is the only part I can't either swap or drop out of the loop, so it could be an actual hardware failure. I'll admit, though, that I am trusting in Westel not to light the "ready" light if there's no signal coming in.)

We have a Stupid DSL Setup in our house, but I'm not sure what to do about it. (This thought is brought to mind by friends who were @home customers.)

Once upon a time, I worked for a company that had a policy of paying for a second phone line to support a modem (back in the days before DSL was available). They would pay for installation once.

When Dani and I moved into our house, DSL was available so we decided we wanted that. The company was in the process of figuring out its policies for paying for DSL. They told me to use the modem policy -- get a new phone line, bill the DSL to that, and put the phone line in the company's name.

But, I said, DSL doesn't compete with voice on the line; you don't *need* a second phone line. We can just add DSL to our existing line and you can pay (or reimburse) the DSL part of the bill.

No deal, they said. They would only pay for DSL if it came on a separate bill to them in the company's name. No reimbursement, no layering on an existing phone line.

Well, we said, this is profoundly stupid, but if they want to waste their money... we realized that at some point we would no longer be employed by that company and then we'd have a stupid situation on our hand, but what could we do?

So we got the phone line, and put DSL on it, and the company was happy, and the phone company was undoubtedly laughing all the way to the bank.

A couple weeks after our installation was complete, the company changed the policy to "we'll just give you $40/month if you have DSL and you deal with it". I was peeved, but moving the service would have cost a couple hundred dollars out of our pockets, so we left it alone.

When I got laid off, Dani and I talked about fixing this. But there are two things that have prevented us from doing anything thus far:

1. The current service works. For Verizon, this is no small feat. Moving the existing service would risk disruption for several weeks.

2. The current service is a permanent connection. New accounts are now PPPoE, which is we're told is a royal pain in the ass. And we'd have to reconfigure our network, and every time we look cross-eyed at the network something goes wrong. Why invite it? So if we set up a *second* account (and later kill the existing one, once it works), we'll be stuck with PPPoE because it will be a new account.

We don't actually know that moving the service would preserve our PPPoE-free existence; they might still screw that up. I'm pretty confident that I could not get a reliable answer from their customer-service people before committing, either.

So we are paying $18/month for an unnecessary phone line to preserve a correctly-functioning connection to the Internet. Is that lame, or what?