| I don't often post mid-week, and I've been shying away from talking about my particular Internet connection for a while, but as a quick reminder, I get 1.5 megabit DSL service from one of the three giant owners of the vestigial Bell Empire. Last year, I had significant issues with the line after moving in and finding out that it was not only slow, but extremely unreliable. I was able to get them to fix it, after much back and forth, and have long since returned to using my preferred modem, which is a VDSL2 device that can fall back to g.DMT ADSL if necessary.
At any rate, a mystery has started today! It's actually quite exciting, even though I vaguely suspect it will take a long time to complete. The first clue I got was that as my colleague slash housemate and I were driving home and I looked upon the DSLAM. There was a truck there with some people performing Blue Stake operations, documenting what utilities were nearby. The whole thing seems to have centered on the DSLAM, with the markings not going very far beyond that. Every utility has marked their lines, and it resulted in a pretty good map of how the DSLAM is wired.
The second clue became apparent to me when I got home and looked at the modem. My line has retrained twice in 24 hours (and this could be the cause of some performance issues I've been having, but who knows.) I don't think I'm starting to have line trouble, but there were also about 500 CRC errors on each end of the line. To me, this indicates that something happened at the DSLAM. Either something was cut and this is all in service of a repair, or something was disconnected while they documented things.
Regardless of what's actually happening, in my mind, this is all the result of the telco dropping in some fiber and installing a new DSLAM. In an even more ideal world, they already actually have a fiber at the DSLAM and these markings are in service of replacing the DSLAM with a new one so they can sell me some faster service.
Updates forthcoming as I have them! |