The latest of the DSL install fiasco. First a little background. There are three companies involved; they are Speakeasy, Covad and Verizon. The only one of these we can speak to about the non-working DSL is Speakeasy - coincidentally also the only one that can't actually do anything to fix it. They are responsible for speaking to Covad, who are responsible for blaming Verizon. Which is fair enough in those instances where Verizon actually are to blame, but this is not one of those instances.
Both Covad and Verizon have sent out techs to our house twice. The first Verizon guy was out to install a new phone jack, and to install a proper demark. Covad's first tech pulled something out of the demark and pretended that would fix it. Their second slowed the line down (which he called "reducing the noise margin" - which, admittedly, it does, but I asked him what that meant and he completely deceptively avoided saying "it means I slowed the line down". If he had said that, I would have been able to tell him it wouldn't help because we already tried that remotely as one of the first troubleshooting attempts. So then, when it still didn't work, they blamed Verizon. A Verizon guy came out, the first visiting tech who seemed the slightest bit competent or honest. He tested the line quality, declared that it's actually really good, and sensibly suggested that the problem is almost certainly with Covad's central office, where we are connected into a shared card; the intermittency, which we long ago said was almost certainly due to crosstalk (which nobody would believe, despite the ridiculously plain evidence), would be explained by the crosstalk occurring at that card, due to a fault in the card or the slot in which it is located. He called Covad, who refused to consider the idea, and declared that they would send a tech out. Again. To see if it's a problem with our lines. Are they saying the first two techs they sent out were incompetent? Perhaps, but I have another theory.
When the tech gets here I'm going to inform him that if he's going to 'fix' anything he's got to tell me and show me exactly what he's doing, because I don't believe that there is anything here for him to fix, and because I believe that what will, in fact, be happening is that he'll be so-called 'fixing' something at the same time as the central office are doing what we've already told them to do, so that they can charge us 'professional install' fees despite, in fact, our end-user-install having been perfectly correct nearly two months ago. I may also have to inform him that if he tries to tell me it's Verizon's fault, without first having the Covad C.O. even so much as try plugging us into a different card, I will be forced to decapitate then defenestrate him.
[17:42]
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