The 7th Circle of Internet Hell

ARGGGGGGGGRRAESHFDSFHasdklcnasdlkjfnalscvjknqacwo;eicna;sdlnfal;sdkjcn!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!111!!!!!!!!!!eleven!!!!!!!!!one!!!!!!!!!!!

That little display doesn’t even come close to the level of insanity I am experiencing right now. Clearly internet withdrawal only gets worse the longer I go without. I’m getting a hit right now courtesy of Starbucks and T-Mobile, and it’s only costing me $10/day!

I suppose I should update my DSL situation. It is approaching ludicrous. As the support guy at Speakeasy said, while they often see one thing go wrong as part of an install, they never see 4 or 5 things go wrong in succession. I feel like there’s a message in this. Maybe God is pointing out the extreme degree of my addiction.

I did learn that CLEC means Competitive Local Exchange Carrier; in my case, that’s Covad, and there the ones who oversee the installation of the DSL circuit inside the building. The ILEC, or Installed LEC, is Verizon (formerly GTE) in my case. They officially wash their hands of anything past the grey box on the outside of a building. When Verizon installed the loop for my data connection (the two outside pins in an RJ-11 modular connector), and then fixed it, they still couldn’t connect it to the wires going into the house.

Because of the delay caused by Verizon’s screw-up, Covad has rescheduled my next install for the 22nd. I was able to pressure a Speakeasy guy into admitting that I could make the connection

On top of all of that, it is likely that my apartment was not properly rewired when it was remodeled. I investigated the situation, and found several concerning things: there is a cable hanging from the rafters in the basement labeled “2nd Floor Phone” that is not connected to anything; the wiring was done using 4 of the 8 conductors in a twisted-pair Cat 5e Ethernet cabling; the data pins were not connected, although the voice pins were. A lot of thanks go out to , who in his role as a Secret Master of Telephony has provided some very helpful information.

I’m going to look at the wiring situation again tonight, but I’m worried that I just don’t have the proper tools to diagnose let alone fix the problem. I suppose I’m supposed to leave it up to my landlord anyway, but he’s currently unreachable, and I want internet NOW.

Anyway, I hope that explains why I have dropped off the planet recently. When one’s primary form of communication is unavailable, one feels rather isolated.


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7 responses to “The 7th Circle of Internet Hell”

  1. stepleton Avatar

    Hey, how about sticking that ululation at the top of your post into an lj-cut so the rest of us don’t have to scroll our lj friends pages back and forth sideways to read them? kthxbye.

  2. Nicolas Ward Avatar

    It doesn’t wrap?

  3. wayman Avatar

    Not that I’ve seen/heard, the wrapping.

    And shouldn’t you have said, somewhere in all this, “I want to see my Internet. I want to see it now. Now now now NOW NOW NOW!” :-)

  4. metaplasmus Avatar

    It does seem to wrap for some of us, possibly those of us with certain virtuous browsers (Camino)? Or maybe it varies from LJ stylesheet (Flexible Squares) to LJ stylesheet?

  5. grumpy_sysadmin Avatar

    Door number two. (<table> is a fickle beast.)

    I’ve always though it’s pretty absurd to complain at other people to edit posts just because it doesn’t look good in the way you’ve chosen to display that data.

  6. naijangie Avatar

    i believe that ILEC stands for incumbent LEC, but i could be wrong. basically, same idea as installed LEC i suppose, somebody who’s just there to take all your money as your DSL provider acts as a middleman.

    ah well… how’s boston?

Nurd Up!