Maybe Not Returning to DSL

I received a let­ter in the mail a cou­ple of weeks ago from AT&T, who has pro­vid­ed my cell­phone ser­vice for at least six years now with very lit­tle trou­ble. Of course, It’s real­ly three dif­fer­ent com­pa­nies: I was on AT&T before AT&T was bought by Cin­gu­lar, which was before Cin­gu­lar bought SBC and start­ed call­ing itself AT&T. AT&T, it seems, is now offer­ing DSL in my neigh­bor­hood. And the prices looked pret­ty good. Instead of the upwards of sev­en­ty bucks each month I shell out for cable (From Com­cast, which in San Fran­cis­co used to be called… wait for it.… AT&T) AT&T is offer­ing DSL to their cell­phone cus­tomers at $25/month. Not an intro­duc­to­ry rate, but a «bun­dle» rate on top of my cell ser­vice. Since I gave up on get­ting HDTV from Com­cast, I spent $50 on a dig­i­tal anten­na and don’t even have the cable plugged into the TV. If and when I feel like watch­ing adver­tise­ments, I can go ahead and get my HDTV over the air.

Any­way, I decid­ed I’d try out sav­ing a lit­tle mon­ey. I called the num­ber on the let­ter and gave AT&T a call. On the phone, the nice rep­re­sen­ta­tive checked to see if there real­ly is ser­vice in my neigh­bor­hood, and told me that if I want­ed, I could go for 6.0 Megabit DSL for $35 instead of $25 for the 1.5 Megabit. That sound­ed good to me.

That was last Mon­day. She told me that my ser­vice was sched­uled to be turned on this Mon­day, the Third. I had a sud­den flash back to years ago when I had to wait for days on end to get DSL lines pro­vi­sioned, com­pared to the hours it took the cable com­pa­ny to get my net­work con­nec­tion turned on. I ignored that momen­tary pan­ic and remind­ed myself that I still have the cable and don’t have to dis­con­nect it until I’m sure the DSL is running.

In order to save a few bucks, I dug up my old DSL modem, but found that I no longer could find the pow­er sup­ply. Look­ing online for the pow­er sup­ply, I found some­one sell­ing the whole darn unit with box and instruc­tions and of pow­er sup­ply for ten bucks. I paid $4 in bridge toll and now have two Speed­stream 5260 DSL modems with one pow­er sup­ply between the two of them.

Mon­day night I plugged it all in and watched the modem fail to make a con­nec­tion. I got on the phone to the sup­port peo­ple and was told on the third try that—whoops!—my line had­n’t been pro­vi­sioned yet and I should call in the morning.

Are you get­ting the sink­ing feel­ing yet?

Yes­ter­day morn­ing I called and, a few hours and a cou­ple more phone calls lat­er, was told that a tech­ni­cian would have to come vis­it me. So I made the appoint­ment and wait­ed for today.

Slow­ly it dawned on me that this AT&T was not the same com­pa­ny (set of com­pa­nies?) that has been pro­vid­ing my excel­lent cell­phone ser­vice all these years. No, that AT&T bought SBC and just slapped the AT&T name on every­thing. This AT&T was the SBC Inter­net that was the Pac­Bell DSL depart­ment that I know from hard-won expe­ri­ence over the years could­n’t find its own ass with both hands.

The tech­ni­cian that showed up today seemed bright and on top of things. I explained the sit­u­a­tion, showed him the jack, and he said, “huh? they told you you could get 6.0 Megabit DSL in this neigh­bor­hood?” I knew that was­n’t a good sign.

He called and test­ed and rum­maged through wires and did more test­ing until he told me that indeed, the best he could do was about 2.0 Mbps, and that even that was shaky. He gave me the num­ber to call to get my ser­vice changed so that I would­n’t get charged the 6.0 Mbps rate. Seemed like a good guy and he knew his stuff. So that is some improve­ment over four and a half years ago when I last dealt with them. How­ev­er, the real dread came when I had to con­fig­ure my router. Using PPPoE, the death of Inter­net con­nec­tions all over the world.

The first thing I noticed in my (emper­or’s) new DSL clothes was that my instant mes­sen­gers kept log­ging me out and recon­nect­ing me after a sec­ond. I blame that on PPPoE, but I could be wrong. It got annoy­ing after the sixth time in a half hour, so I logged out of my IM software.

Add on to that that 1.5Mbps is pret­ty slow. Call me spoiled, but when I went to down­load some soft­ware I was amazed at how long it took. Slow. Slow like swim­ming through molasses or try­ing to solve dif­fer­en­tial equa­tions on cough syrup.

Did I do an actu­al test? Yes. Using a pop­u­lar broad­band speed test web­site, I got a down­load speed of 1600 Kbps and an upload speed of 175 Kbps with the new DSL. My cable modem? 18,400 Kbps down­load and 1700 Kbps upload. Just for kicks, I tried with the iPhone: on the 3G net­work I got a speed of 652Kbps and EDGE got me 169Kbps. (The iPhone ver­sion does­n’t give sep­a­rate num­bers for upload and down­load.) I tried WiFi on the iPhone too, and got 1478Kbps. But that’s cheat­ing, isn’t it? since real­ly it’s using the cable modem as its connection.

Any­way, I want­ed to save a few bucks but I think half the price for a tenth the speed is pret­ty poor on the bang per buck bench­mark. I’ll still can­cel the TV part of my cable ser­vice, but I’m chalk­ing the rest of this up to an inex­pen­sive but valu­able lesson.