Our internet service has been disrupted for the second time in recent weeks, and they can’t send a technician until next Monday—a whole week after I contacted them.
Though the provider’s name has changed over the years, our service is DSL (Digital Subscriber Line) over copper phone lines connected to the house before we moved in in 1981.
The current provider is Brightspeed. It is usually adequate for our needs but seems increasingly unstable, with the internet being lost momentarily, sometimes several times a day.
A month ago, we lost our DSL completely. After going through all the diagnostics with Brightspeed online support, a technician was scheduled for the following Thursday, five days away!
The technician was able to resolve the issue by having something cycled remotely. I asked him if support could have done this when I reported the problem. He said they could have.
This time, our problem is that the internet is very slow. We’re supposed to have ~10 Mbps download, but we’re only getting 0.02 Mbps.
Over the weekend, I couldn’t get their support chat to work, and Bightspeed support is unavailable by phone on weekends.
Our phones have personal hotspots but are inadequate for streaming shows, news, and other videos we usually watch. We’re about 2 miles from the nearest cell tower, and our download speed when connected to the hotspot is about 20 times as fast as what we currently get with our degraded Brightspeed DSL connection.
Today, I finally got through on the Brightspeed support chat. After I got through to a human, Alner, I followed their diagnostic suggestions even though I had already taken every action they suggested. The chat locked up after unplugging power and DSL and then reconnecting to the router.
After several tries to access chat, I was connected to another human. I explained to Louise what I had already done. She concluded that we were still not getting a good signal while the modem was correctly configured. When I asked if there was anything they could cycle on the system that might resolve the issue remotely, she said from checking our line’s status that it is very unstable and, “For us to fix this permanently, we need to send out a technician.”
“The date of your dispatch will be 12/23/2024 after 8 am before 5 pm.”
That’s an entire week!
It’s also just a few days before our Starlink hardware should arrive.
