Brian's Brain

For those of you wondering why I've been asking about Internet-based power management and wireless speaker setups, the truth can now be told. Two Fridays ago, my wife and I had the blessed fortune to close escrow on a small home at ~7,000 feet in the Sierras. We've spent the last week moving in, soaking up the sunshine and stunning vistas, and exploring the hiking trails less than a minute away from our front door. Tech will intrude on this idyllic get-away, albeit as unobtrusively as possible. To wit, I plan to devote an upcoming feature article to my experiences setting up the remote control and monitoring gear I'm currently accumulating and installing.

Step one was acquiring broadband access at our little slice of Nirvana. For the first week, we relied on the Linksys WRT54G3G-ST 3G router. Unfortunately, '3G' is a pipe dream in this particular location; neither Sprint nor Verizon provides anything faster than 1xRTT data rates, and GSM providers offer nothing faster than GPRS. As I twiddled my thumbs waiting for web pages and email to download, I was struck by how spoiled I'd become; having had DSL at my home office since early 1999, and with access to EV-DO Rev. 0 and A while traveling, the dial-up speeds that served me well for my first six years' worth of Internet usage had become unpalatable.

Three broadband options were available; cable, DSL and satellite. We didn't plan on getting cable TV, so the cable broadband-only high price tag was unattractive. The high prices and VoIP-incompatible high 'ping'-to-'ack' latencies of satellite broadband were equally unpalatable. So we went the DSL route. Had AT&T offered unbundled DSL, we might have foregone POTS, although my wife appreciates the security of, if the power goes out, still having telephone access. However, while in the past we might have purchased a complete local-plus-long distance telephone package, this time we only went with ~$6 metered local service; between cellular, VoIP and calling cards, our long-distance needs were already covered.

Some of you might be old enough to remember what customer service was like prior to the gradual government-forced un-monopolization of AT&T that culminated in the early-'80s creation of seven independent RBOCs (regional bell operating companies). Suffice it to say that, as Tom Yager reminisces, 'service' was an oxymoron in this particular case. The new AT&T is, with regulatory approval, looking quite a bit like the old AT&T (as a flowchart provided by Wikipedia makes clear). I wondered, in light of this re-consolidation, what my experience setting up POTS and DSL service would be like. It was, in retrospect, far smoother than I'd feared, although it started out pretty rocky.

Two Fridays back, once I heard that escrow had closed and the place was ours, I jumped on AT&T's website and attempted to sign up online. The first few tedious order entry sequences I attempted ended with 'server technical error' messages and an invitation to instead call AT&T. However, my first telephone call ended, after 45 minutes of listening to 'we care about your service, please hold' messages, with an abrupt disconnect on the other end of the line. After being on hold for another 30 minutes on my second telephone attempt, I gave up and returned to the AT&T website.

This time, I had partial success. I attempted to order a bundled telephone-plus-DSL package I was offered, but amusingly after selecting it I was asked if I already had telephone service (?). When I answered 'no', I was routed through a sequence of screens that enabled me to apply for a telephone number....but at the end, I wasn't provided a means of ordering DSL. And, when I subsequently attempted to append DSL to my existing order by going through the DSL-only application screens, the system indicated it didn't recognize the phone number I'd just set up.

The next morning, I got AT&T on the line and attempted to add DSL to my order....again without success. Since my order was still 'in process', customer service couldn't edit it; my only option (which I declined) was to cancel the order and start from scratch. Finally, on Tuesday morning, I received an 'order processing complete' email, got AT&T on the phone again, and got DSL added to our plan. The POTS service was supposed to be activated by 7PM Tuesday night, but that deadline came and went with nothing but dead air coming out of my telephone speaker. So, on Wednesday morning, I again rung up AT&T via cellular. Within 1.5 hours, a technician was at our front door and, after figuring out that the problem was on AT&T's end, he got us telephone service shortly thereafter.

We headed back to Sacramento Wednesday evening; the free-after-rebate DSL modem was supposed to be delivered on Thursday, with service to be subsequently activated by 8PM Friday. Judging by the UPS shipment waiting at our front door Friday morning when we returned to our Sierra abode, AT&T fulfilled its promise....and DSL service was already enabled when I plugged the modem (which came with several line filters, and which actually appears to be a combo modem-plus-router) in. The PPPoE dynamic IP setup was incident-free; I used the web browser interface for both the modem and AT&T account setup versus running the included software. And, although I've encountered a few minor hiccups so far (which'll provide fodder for future blog posts), basic Internet access is trouble-free and quite fast for $20/month:

I was also pleased with the informative, automated emails and phone messages which AT&T sent our way. I give the experience a tepid thumbs-up. What has your experience been with AT&T or another telecom provider?