Re: [tlug] ISDN connection

["Ulrich Plate" <plate@example.com>]

Jonathan Byrne wrote:

> If I'm not under the wrong impression, isn't that kind of unusual for
> Japan?  People complain about their DSL quite a bit in the States, but
I've
> heard it's pretty stable in Japan.

Don't get me started on that one. Long story short, I'm 2.8 km away from the
next NTT switch, yet had perfect DSL connections for a year before all hell
broke loose six, seven weeks ago. Since then, I'm keeping eAccess and your
support people in a mixed state of genuine puzzlement, despair and fatalism
(they're all great guys, by the way, totally committed to getting this back
up and running). Fact is: I have a noise level of 60 dB on the cable from
the switch to my hoanki, and 120 dB from there to my desk. The inhouse
cables are running through the same conduit as the ISDN line, granted, but
why did that work for twelve months and not any more? Join the Headscratcher
Posse.

> What say you, DSL users?  Does DSL keep your flock of penguins happy, or
> does it yoyo up and down?

Part of our desperate attempts to stabilise my line was a visit from a My
Tsuho guy from Tokyo Gas (My Tsuho is a device that lets you shut down your
gas pipe via a phone call and reports what the gauge says back to Tokyo Gas,
and it is susceptible of interfering with DSL if not configured right). His
story beat everything I've heard so far: He was too busy to come visit me
for five days after my distress call because all he does, day in, day out,
is verifying installations at customers premises because of DSL complaints.
Needless to say that My Tsuho wasn't broken at all, it's using the ISDN
circuit, so kankei nai to the DSL problem. He said that the number of
complaints has rocketed sky-high in the past few months just because of the
enormous popularity of DSL lines, especially since everybody is getting 8
Mbit/s. That and the fact that the cables deteriorate over time and nobody
knows how often NTT puts fresh circuits into place have me actively thinking
about switching to fibre. Pity for eAccess, they're doing a great job, but I
can't afford to be offline half of the time.

Cheers
Ulrich Plate