Man, I had hopes that I would never see the acronym DSLAM again! For 3 years I worked for maybe THE worst DSL provider in the history of DSL. Granted it was a big company but every day the first thing we were told to do was review the outages so when people called from those areas we knew why they were down. The lists got as long as 10 and 12 pages! The company's business growth model was to buy failing small phone companies and grow the customer base that way. However, they also never put money into upgrading any of the infrastructure, so the reasons they sucked as the old company, the reason they were failing, came right along with the acquisition. And so many customers assumed that being passed along to a new parent company equated to the service getting better. I'll take "Wrong assumptions for 600 Alex." Landline phones should really just go away. They serve no purpose at all.

Part of it was that the customers they were picking up were from these rural areas that weren't even on maps yet! The box where the wire went into the house (called the NID) would fail a lot because of brutal rain and wind.

We had an area outside of Houston and when the hurricane (Ike?) blew through in 2010-ish I got a all from a woman screaming about her internet being down. It went liek this.

Me: Okay. First of all, please calm down and bring your voice down about 30 decibels. Yelling isn't going to get things fixed any faster. Now, you are calling on your cell phone, right?

Her: Yes.

Me: And why is that?

Her: Because the house phone is dead.

Me: Okay. Now knowing that your DSL internet comes in on the same wires as your phone, how can you expect that your phone could be dead but your internet would be working?

Her: Oh. When when do you think it will be fixed?

Me: Well, is there a lot of traffic on the streets right now?

Her: No. The roads are impassible.

Me: Do you know if FEMA is in the area?

Her: Yes. They are staging on the edges of town.

Me: Okay. When FEMA allows our trucks to go in, our people can start replacing all the wiring that was torn down by the rain and 100 mph winds. Until then, there is really nothing we can do since the trucks can't get into the town.

Her: Oh. Well, when you explain it like that....

Me: Ma'am, I am thinking you should be grateful that you are alive and that the cell phone towers made it through the winds or you wouldn't even have call phone service. Maybe you want to call any family that lives elsewhere and tell them you are okay while you have battery power. I can't imagine you have electricity and I'd even guess that your car is under water and won't start so you can't use the car to charge the phone. I am glad to know you are okay and rest assured we want you back up and running as much as you do so we don't have to get a phone call like this from every subscriber in the city.

Her: I can imagine you may get a lot of these.

Me: Yeah, well, it comes with the territory. In a little while there will be an automated message that will reply to all calls from your area. Please stay safe and we'll get this fixed as soon as we can.

WHY do people think that JUST that one aspect of technology is so bulletproof that when everything else is down the internet should work?

3 days later the winds from that hurricane made it to Ohio. We had gusts in the 80s, and we NEVER have that here. The wind blew over a tree, which fell into a power transformer, which set the tree on fire, the flames from which burned every wire it touched. And my luck? That building where it happened was the Time-Warner switch that fed my area. I was down 3 days. And just an aside, for those who complain about TWC now Spectrum... I have had them for 15 years, and counting those 3 days I don't think I have had 10 days total where I was down completely.

There was also a day when any browsing going west would drop my connection and I had to power cycle their box, but I was able to trace it to a hub in Chicago with some diag tools, and I called them, got some guy in Toronto named Patrick, told him the IP of the router that was down, and when he couldn't ping it they sent some routing changes to the hop before it to take it out of the loop while they replaced it.