Our DSL came back to life on Friday night. Working with the ISP, we'd reached the "well, maybe it's a problem with your line" stage, and they'd made an appointment for someone from SBC to come out and test our line. If there was a fault between the central office and our service entrance, it was SBC's problem, and they'd fix it at no cost; if there was a fault somewhere inside the house, it was my problem, and I could either pay the SBC guy to fix it or take the matter up myself.
Haunted by the specter of possibly spending money (my great motivator), I crawled underneath the house for another look at our phone lines. I ended up hauling out around a couple hundred feet of wire (the remnants of an alarm system that was installed by trained monkeys who really liked wire, plus an unused extension) and rewiring the surviving extensions' connection to the service entrance.
And that did it! I don't know why all of the wirejunk underneath our house was perfectly benign until just last week, but there you go. Maybe it was the cumulative effect of all those constant low-level earthquakes shifting stuff around just enough ...
Posted by Kevin at September 25, 2005 08:35 AM