[ale] AT&T DSL Support - it is a Turing Test?

[Jeremy T. Bouse]

I just kept calling AT&T DSL Support and asking to be escalated every
time my connection dropped... They eventually escalated me to their
"Presidential Level" (I assume their ERT dept) and they rolled a truck
out to my location at no cost. The tech that came out was first
impressed with my in-house wiring as he stated he'd never seen anything
like it before and then he proceeded to give me a new DSL modem (no
charge and old modem was < 2 years old) as well as replace the Optical
Network Card (ONC) in the beige box across the street in my neighbor's
front yard. Haven't had any problems since!

Now, a few things of note...

1) my wife won't stay in a room if I'm calling customer support as she
says I make them cry... I've actually told a Verisign support tech to
"Stop trying to blow smoke up my ass" when he was giving me a clearly
insane answer to a problem...

2) My subdivision is delivered over fiber up to the beige box across the
street (< 25 yards) from my NTI on the outside of my house

3) From the NTI there is < 3 feet of CAT5 running from the customer side
of the NTI to the DSL filter card in my Leviton Structured Media Center
where my DSL modem is plugged into. It's then CAT5 from the DSL modem to
my Linksys WRTSL54GS running DD-WRT.

Neal Rhodes wrote:
> If I were to summarize the responses, they would tend to indicate:
> 
> A. No, I'm not talking to a Turing machine, these are real human beings
> at the other end of the chat, and..
> B. No, there's not a know way of getting to AT&T support people that
> actually know anything about DSL. 
> 
> About the 4th chat attempt they were actually willing to escalate and
> send a service tech out to the house.  That's about the point that I
> thought, "hey, let's try  plugging this little bugger in at the DMARC."
> And it got 8810K downstream at the DMARC, and only 2700 downstream at
> the wall jack.     A bit of futzing, putting a splitter at the DMARC,
> and using a home-run wire to the office got that up to 8100K downstream.
> I might be able to get that up to 8810 if I replaced that existing
> home-run wire with CAT5. 
> 
> I guess we'll see how many calls it takes to get a technician out to put
> in a permanent exterior DSL splitter at the DMARC.  
> 
> Neal Rhodes
> MNOP Ltd
>