Bote's Mixer Board more reliable--maybe?

I can't make any promises--BUT--BellSouth.net promised me that my frequent intermittent outages will not recur.

It turns out that when I originally ordered my DSL service I asked for the top tier which, at the time, was 3 Megabits / second. I'm too far from the central office and the cable is so old and crappy that it can't handle that speed, so they backed me down to 1.5Mb service.

The trouble is that the downgraded setting just won't stick. They have a local database at my c.o. with the working profile and the master database up in Atlanta with the original unworkable profile settings. Periodically Atlanta's 800 pound gorilla of a database comes down here and stomps all over the good changes that the techs have made and I wind up back in DSL hell.

At least I know what to look for now, and so do you if you have similar symptoms: brief outages lasting just long enough to resynchronize with the DSLAM (60-90 seconds) typically during thunderstorms. It doesn't affect web pages so much, but streaming media such as your Vonage VoIP phone call or, ohhh say, Internet radio get disconnected. You can log into your DSL modem management screen to see what the downstream line speed is set to.

We shall see how long this latest repair lasts. In the meantime I can't wait for Uverse to roll into my 'hood.

UPDATE 2009.06.12

Nope, the DSL still goes out when the wind blows. I'll have to kick some BellSouth butt here.