DSL woes

English: DSL cable into modem (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Ok, Here is how you get internet connection where I lived before. Just call the ISP, they will send a technician the next day with a fibro-optic modem, and you are online. The line never drops and the quality is good. If you face any problems call the ISP’s call centre and they will sort it out for you. If they cannot do it over the phone, they will send someone to your home to sort things out.

Now here is how I received internet connection in my new home, half way across the globe. I called an ISP and selected a plan. After one week, I received the DSL modem in the mail. Few days later, a technician from another company came to give the connection (BTW, we share the same name. The company and me, not the technician). The technician gave us a “dry line” connection and connected the modem. The dsl light kept flashing with no internet. The technician called the original ISP, but they did not respond. He told me that his job is done and advised me to contact the original ISP to sort things out and he left.

A DSL Modem (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

So I called the original ISP. They asked me to wait for 24 hours. Nothing changed after a day and I called them again. They said the problem may be with the line inside the house. 2 weeks of no internet was too much of a first world problem to bear, so I got into the DIY troubleshooting mode. I read about dsl and realized that certain home appliances can potentially interfere with signal which incidentally shares the higher frequency band of your normal telephone line. So I switched off all electrical appliances except the fridge. I inverted the chord and tried to keep it as straight as possible. Reset the modem several times. But the light kept blinking and blinking……….

Finally after few hours of desperate trouble shooting, I checked the telephone socket. The ISP support guys never asked me to see inside the socket. I noticed that the contacts inside had some rust on it. I cleaned the contacts with my deodorant and q-tips and voila.. it started working. So if your dsl is giving you problems, don’t forget to look inside the socket. Your q-tips may come handy to clean inside.

Later I started facing another problem. After about a day of trouble free connection, the internet becomes very slow. I googled for probable causes and found that it could be due to faulty memory management by the modem firmware. There was no option for a firmware upgrade. Now I switch off the modem before going to sleep, so that it will work trouble free in the morning. Somebody had suggested using a garden timer to reset the modem at a specific time of the day, the most ingenious solution I could find.

In the country where I lived before, the ISP had different problems though the connection was stable and the support was good. If you get billed extra by mistake, you are screwed. You have no rights as a consumer. I once got charged extra (by a huge margin) for a mobile data service. I took the bill to their service centre and they accepted their mistake. But I received the same bill next month and I did the same again. Following month I received a notice from their lawyers for not paying the bills! There the ISP has the right to decide what you should not see on the net and such sites are blocked. But that is another story

BTW, does your dsl give you problems?

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