Julie wrote:
I haven't tried it from the phone (just read in an old thread on this
newsgroup that you can sometimes call out without a dial tone), but I did
unwittingly try to get on-line once without a dial tone, and there was no
answer. We are always unable to get a dial tone at the box, too.

If you mean by this that you plugged a telephone (without a separate
power jack) into the Network Interface box somewhere on the outside of
your residence, then you definitely need to call Verizon; it's their
problem, in some fashion. Electrical storms can certainly burn out or
stress equipment and something may need replacement. Given that you've
had problems with more than one piece of *your* equipment, feel free to
assume it's a more general problem.

Make sure that you double-check by *opening* the box and plugging into
the *internal* jack. There's often a short ~6" dongle attached that goes
outside, and it can get loose as well.

Anyway, so I'm wondering if anyone else has had this problem. My husband
thinks it's related to being on-line, but I'm on-line a lot, so I'm not
convinced that that's not just coincidental. I'll give Verizon a call
tomorrow, but I'm afraid that they'll want to see the problem in action, and
I'm not quite sure how to reproduce it.

Don't worry too much. Their field engineers see this sort of problem
*all* the time. No matter what you say, really, they're going to do
their own investigation and yes, perhaps, only if they've already been
out and you RE-report the problem will they actually do much more than
what I outlined above, i.e. what you the customer can do.