On Jun 19, 12:00*am, Pat wrote:
Verizon seems to be in complete chaos today after completely screwing
up my dry-loop DSL order over a month ago when I canceled my land-line
in favor of Vonage. *They had no records of my dry loop being
installed and had some dry-loop number reserved for me but never
installed.

Two techs were here yesterday and couldn't make sense out of it. *They
came because my service kept going down. *They used my computer to run
a test and the result said that the modem was off -- now THAT is
screwed up.

This morning, the internet died. *Dead. *So I called Verizon and they
seemed like an 8-armed Indian God where the 3rd arm from the left
didn't know what the 2nd arm from the right was doing. *I was on the
phone for over an hour.

The final result was that I had to cancel the non-working DSL number
that was never hooked up. *That will take 3 to 5 business days. *After
that, I have to call them back and re-order DSL. *It'll be another 3
to 5 days to get it hooked up. *Sure I'll call them. *;-)
Meanwhile, I called our local cable company and got internet through
them. *$5 per month more for 4.5X the speed. *It's up and running but
they are sending a tech out tomorrow to get the speed up to where it
should be. *It is only running at 2X DSL speed right now. *The is a
bit more latency in it that DSL but I'll live with it.

So in the last 6 weeks I have dropped my land-line service and my DSL
service. *Tomorrow the fax line goes, too, because I have a cloud-
based service to do that for a LOT less than Verizon. *So tomorrow
this will be a Verizon-free zone.

It is hard to believe how much technology has changed. *Not long ago
Verizon was the ONLY way to get phone service and AT&T was a
monopoly. *Now, they are gone from my house. *Wow.

Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone and did a pretty good job
of it. *Too bad he didn't invent Customer Service to go along with it.

Today the Cable company tech came out because my internet was supposed
to be 8 mbps and it was running at 3 (still twice the DSL speed). He
changed by grounding block due to corrosion (his exact words were, "Oh
my God, that's an antique") (it was at least 20 years old). He then
ran a new cable line for me -- straight from where it hit the house to
the modem. Not it is running between 5 mbps and 11 mbps, depending on
the test, time of day, voodoo and whatever.

There is definitely more lag with this than with the DSL but it also
didn't take 2 weeks to get installed. I did the self install myself,
they tested it from somewhere in PA, and then the tech was there at
10:00 the next morning. You can't beat that.

The tech said that he and the other tech that handle this area (we are
a small community of about 5,000) were doing 9 phone installs today.
Wow. Verizon must not be doing any new installs. That's a lot for a
city of this size.

I don't like the lag but I guess I'll have to live with it.

Here's an interesting detail I found out that is SIGNIFICANTLY
different between cable and DSL. For cable, they provision (register)
the modem but really don't know where it is. So you can take it to
someplace else in the same cable system locality and plug it into
their cable and it'll work. So for example, if my kid is going to a
friend's house for a night of on-line gaming, he could take the router
and plug it into the friend's cable and it'll work. Therefore they
can meet up and bring the highest speed with them for the night.
That's pretty wild.