Re: Ol' Gar fights AT&T and gets whupped!! [long]

Robert Bonomi wrote:
In article <6o9e2dF2d8dsU1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Lone Haranguer <linuszrv@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Robert Bonomi wrote:
In article <6o5mcgF214fkU1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Lone Haranguer <linuszrv@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Frank Howell wrote:
Lone Haranguer wrote:
bill horne wrote:
Lone Haranguer wrote:
bill horne wrote:
Bob Giddings wrote:
On Thu, 13 Nov 2008 14:37:26 -0500, bill horne <redydog@xxxxxxx>
wrote:

Bob Giddings wrote:
On Thu, 13 Nov 2008 12:20:58 -0500, bill horne <redydog@xxxxxxx>
wrote:

Gar wrote:

Got me by the short-hairs.. additcted to this damn internet..
Switching is an even worse option.. can't be right???

Sooooooo... I pays em.. yup.. back on line.. Back on
RORT... Back on Ebay.. Back on Bus-nuts... Back on Palin
fan Club...

Life is good....


I'm just starting my own tussle with AT&T - to get DSL. On the
map at the link, the greens have, or can get DSL. The red - me
- "is not available yet". What??

http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?hl=en&ie=UTF8&t=h&msa=0&msid=109035965267721307698.00045b95291ad4bf26dba&ll=32.074793,-83.190622&spn=0.020219,0.031757&z=14
Perhaps word has gotten out that you are a difficult customer...
You'd think that in this day and age, a person who has no debts
and pays his monthly utilities on time - which I am and do -
would be a preferred customer.
You'd think so. Got to be another factoid at work here.

Possibly they've gotten the Payometer reading mixed up with the
Pinyonator report. How'd you do on the Pinyonator? Maybe you're
too pinyonated.

Another possibility is the Complaintograph. Screw that up, and
it can Dog you for years.

It's a mystery. But there's got to be an answer in there
somewhere. It's all a matter of accurate possibilification.

Sam Sleuth
Just on a whim, I turned on my Serendipity Attractor when I was on
the way home from WalMart a little while ago. I then spotted an
AT&T van about a half a mile from my house, so I stopped with the
intent of maybe plopping somebody.

Turns out AT&T has an error in my record that shows that the actual
line associated with my phone number is not where their records say
it is. Now that they've corrected their fuckup, I'll probably have
3 Mbps by the end of next week - and once I run Cat 5 to my
computer room, I can probably get 6 Mbps. The AT&T guy says.

damn. It pays to go to WalMart. And it probably helped that my wife
knows the AT&T guy's father (any innuendo about that by anyone will
be unwelcome, and should I ever meet any innuendoer, he/she will be
summarily plopped, and the beer will be locked up).

What happened to the Hughes dish? Bushes grow faster than you could
trim them?

Or did their speeds decline to a fraction of that advertised?
LZ
The dish still works, but if I can get DSL, I can get twice the
speed at half the price - without the latency.

Unless you're using it as a portable connection, Hughes is not a
bargain. Sounds like DSL would be a step up. I don't know exactly
what they have to do to change a standard phone line into one capable
of supporting DSL but I know Qwest didn't have to do any digging to
bring it to the farm. I bugged them about it for several years and
they kept telling me they would have to bury new cable. Then
suddenly one day it was available without any new cable being laid.

I think they were shittin' me.
LZ
No, for DSL to work they have to install equipment both in the field near your service area, in weather proof huts or underground vaults and inside the central office. The equipment cost is in the low thousands.

I have no idea where they would have installed this new equipment unless it was in the town 3 miles away. No new huts or vaults anywhere between. They do have a building in the town where it could have been added. I know damn well there was no digging for new cable on the route though.
That's probably the "why" you couldn't get it previously. "too far away", from the C.O., where the equipment was. First-generation DSL had a working maximum distance of 13,000-14,000 ft 'wire distance', not straight line. Newer gear can deliver a usable signal more than 20,000 ft.

It is also a safe bet that _somewhere_ between you and the telco office
there is at least one (and probably 2-3) 'splice point' -- where several
smaller cables are spliced into a single bigger cable going back towards
the telco.

If there _was_ an actual 'wire' problem, it could have been on one of the upstream segments, and they pulled replacement wire _there_, which fixed the problem, although with no activity near your house.


I asked my brother about it today. He worked for Ma Bell, then ATT and then Qwest for over 30 years. They didn't do diddly except for new equipment in their building in town, which is 3 miles from the farm. People farther down the road all were offered DSL at the same time.

Confirming what I said in my first paragraph. :) Thats a clear indication of
an expanded service area due to 'next generation' gear being deployed. Going from "under 3 mile" to "5 mile" gear roughly _triples_ the service area, and gives 3 times more customers to spread the fixed cost over. Add in a projected higher percentage of subscriptions, and what couldn't be offered at a price customers would pay now can be. Suddenly, it makes 'business
sense' to do what was *not* "sensible" to do previously.

Rural areas had a low priority for DSL, period.

No argument on that. The minimum head-end gear is _expensive_, and could
only serve a _limited_ distance out from the C.O. Rural areas got low
priority for *that* reason -- the number of people within the circa 14,000
ft limit in farm country is *very* small. With, say, eight 80-acre farms
per square mile, a 3 mile (15,000 ft) radius gives about 225 _potential_
customers. If you get 50% subscription, that's only 110-115 accounts to
spread the cost of the head end among.

The 'user-base independent' part of the build-out in a Central office -- the
hardware itself, the labor, all the 'prep' work, etc) is *easily* in the
high 5, or low 6, figures. Plus a few hundred per actual customer.

Where the population density is as low as the illustration above, that comes
out to around $1,000 per customer that the telco has to recover from the
'profits' from selling the service. With profits of maybe $10-12/line/month,
how long does it take to recoup the original investment? _while_ returning
a decent ROI to the people you borrowed that construction capital from. Can you do it before you have to replace the current equipment that has been obsoleted by technology advances?


$30/mo for the first year, $40/mo after that. Originally they had an introductory rate of $25/mo.
LZ
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