I took Thursday off so I could meet their tech and he could look at my NID, but they did a line test remotely and cancelled the appointment without telling me. So I got to stay home, and stay-at-home all day and burn an extra day of vacation over something that would have been totally avoidable (i.e. if they were going to cancel, they could have let me fucking know).

I’ve ordered Speakeasy.net DSL and VOIP, which is sort of the reverse of my current situation, where Verizon was running DSL on my normal phone lines.

There will be some complication as I negotiate the need for a “hard line” for my monitored alarm system.

But whatever. I was looking for an opportunity to throw money at the problem, and I am so doing.

Speakeasy will probably end up costing $30 or so dollars more per month, but perhaps there will be better connectivity and less heartache if I do need support. We’ll see.

I bought a new DSL modem (not a model Verizon supports, by the way, but a lot better as far as advanced diagnostics goes - the Zoom brand, which used to be the Hayes brand, or acquired it somehow, for the geeks out there) and it didn’t make a whit of difference for our household bandwidth.

So I called Verizon last night, and the conversation that unfolded had so many similarities to Eddie Izzard’s Death Star Cantina sketch that I am moved to illustrate it here. It’s a bit out of order, though, so I’ll stick with the Izzard script (transcribed here - 1 pic very mildly NSFW, language NSFW).

End result, though, is that they’re going to exchange my old modem for a new one that they do support, but that if this doesn’t fix it (and odds are damned low) I’m going to move to a dedicated line with Speakeasy.net, probably with a lower bandwidth, but also probably with less stupid. I will however do some more diagnostics inside the house first, and probably also call normal phone repair about a possibly related problem with the entire line I have ADSL on. [Read more →]

The ultimate result was that calling them at 1-800-4MYXBOX (1-800-469-9269) was the proper request channel. Details of failed contacts follow:
[Read more →]