This sucks

[Ed62]

Yesterday morning, I was online for a short while, when things slowed down, nearly to a halt. In fact, it got bad enough where I couldn't load a web page. This has happened before, and it took a call to tech support to straighten things out. I called tech support, thinking I would be up and running again within a few minutes. After talking to a woman from India for about an hour (minumum), it was evident that I wasn't going to be online for a while. Having AT&T (SBC Yahoo!), I was surprised to find that when I was talking to tech support, there was a *lot* of static. I have a hard time understanding people from India, and this made matters much worse. You would think AT&T would at least give you a clear line for tech support. Anyhow, when our conversation was about over, she told me to contact Linksys, because there must be a problem with the router. Before I tried calling them, my wife wanted to make a call to one of our daughters. When she picked up the phone, she told me there was a terrible noise in the line. It was *our* problem!!

I am now temporarily online, having bypassed the problem. But that takes away phone lines in the rest of the house. Now I'll have to see if I can find somewhere that is open today, so I can buy the necessary items for a permanent fix. Just wanted to rant, and now I feel better (almost).

Ed

[MikeR]

I feel your pain. I went through one of those offshore 'service' calls last week when I had router problems.

Not pretty.

Hope things work out.

Cheers,

MikeR

[WayneJ]

About a week ago my system had slowed down to the point where it took about 1 min just to get the home page up. After a long conversion with tech support, he thought the problem was in one of the splitters in the cable string. Cable vision has a store about 2 miles from where I live. I took all the splitters with me and they GAVE me all new ones, for free. Changed the old ones out and now its as fast as ever. Might be worth a try. T.V. seems clearer now.
Wayne

[jackellis]

30 years ago, when there was no broadband and a 4800 baud connection was considered fast, we'd get static on the lines and poor voice and data communications each fall when the temperatures dropped. I know some weather has been moving through the midwest. Might or might not be related.

[JR]

Ed, I'd try to isolate the problem a bit more before buying any routers or other major change.

I assume you know that your voice and DSL signals are travelling on the same pair of wires between your house the phone co's central office. You've got noise on the phone and slow data service (which could be a manifestation of noisy data).

You might try disconnecting your DSL modem as a first step. Now check the quality of the voice signal. If the voice is good then you've got a problem in your house with the data devices (DSL modem, router, switch, wireless WAP, etc.).

If the voice is still bad then the indication is something wrong with the telco equipment - wires between your house and the telco, the DSL Access equipment are the likely culprits).

BTW - do not remove the little gizmo that connects between the telephones and the wall phone outlets. This is required to isolate the phone signals from the DSL signals. It might be a good idea to go around the house checking that no phones are directly connected to the wall phone outlet without one of those gizmos in place.

JR

[Jbridge337]

if dsl, could be a bad filter somewhere...

jim

[Ed62]

When I was online this morning, I had already pinpointed the problem. HD was open, so I got what I needed. Ran a new Cat 5 cable from the interface box that services the house. Took it to a junction box (I guess that's what you call it), and ran Cat 5 to the phone jack for the computer. It seems that my online service is faster than before. Everything's back in order.

I should have told you that tech support told me they're having a lot of problems with I.E. 7.0. But that wasn't my problem.

Ed