A brief update on the battle with AT&T:

After telling me that my web order could not be completed, I postponed placing the order by telephone for about a week.

The day after I placed the phone order, I received an automated phone call from AT&T informing me that my DSL had been "activated." My regular dial-up connection turned to bovine excrement and had to be reset.

A phone call to the 'phone order guys elicited the information that the order I had placed by telephone was the only one that existed. They called me a liar for saing that AT&T had called to say the service had been connected. (LiK also had picked up the phone when it rang, so both of us heard the message.)

The next day, I received the modem - per the web order that was never placed. Based on the telephone order I wasn't supposed to get it for another week. The DSL on my line was of course turned back off. ...

In the course of all this, the "scheduled turnon date" was changed four times, with two of the "changes" being discovered only when I called them about something else. (I didn't get any help with the "something else" with any of those calls.)

As soon as the web order was attempted, my access to the "support(?)" website was blocked, requiring registration - which required knowing my account information, which of course I wouldn't know until the service was actually turned on and connected so I could register it.

A week of attempting to get to someone at land-line support/repair/maintenance/accounting/ ... ... etc got me nothing but "we don't answer questions until you pay $300 to have one of our guys come out." I now have four separate phone numbers I can call to get no help from AT&T; but that's about all I accomplished trying to communicate with them.

Detailed tracing of the wiring into my home, at the point-of-entry (POE in the web info, but SI - apparently for "service interface" at the phone office) showed that the lines to the interface were crosswired on "their side of the connection." It did require some "compensating patches" in my house wiring.

In tracing the house wiring, I found that there had been a "broken wire" somewhere that was fixed "somewhere" by cross-wiring so that the green wire going in one end came out yellow on the other end on one run, and another went in black and came out blue with a white stripe. As so far as I know, the prior owner did not do most of the phone wiring so he probably paid the $300 to have the phone guys make these "repairs." (green to black, white with blue or orange stripes, or red to yellow, or to blue or orange with white stripes are "acceptable" per wiring standards. These two "changes" crossed the color codes for line and return on the same wire.)

Because of an apparent short-circuit in one of the internal wire runs, I wasn't able to just hook two lines to that run, so I did finally run a new drop to the location where I can connect to the computers.

Once I had a line to connect to - on our primary phone number where the DSL was, eventually, turned on, I found that the "instructions" received with the new modem were WRONG. If the instructions were followed, connection WOULD ALWAYS BE IMPOSSIBLE. Three hours on the phone with one of their "support guys" got me transferred "to a higher level" where I eventually got one of the computers connected. (The first guy made a valiant attempt to be helpful, but didn't know how. The "higher level" person apparently was more skilled, but mumbled a lot (I think she was eating lunch?) so it took "only" abot two hours on the phone at second echelon to get one machine up. I've really got to get me a hands-free phone!!!!)

Since getting machine 1 (not the one I wanted) connected required making a direct machine-modem hookup, a couple of hours trying to reinsert either the new router or my previous Ethernet switch showed an "absence of required information" that the DSL provider was supposed to have given me and didn't to set up the router, and reinstalling the switch still left only one machine able to get to the web.

Another phone call back to support - which can ONLY be reached by "not saying anything" for about 4 minutes (average - standard deviation +/- 7 minutes) until the automated "please press one if your question is this one on our list" times out.

A little less than an hour for "support" to discover that an incorrect protocol setting from the instructions that came with the modem was "part of the problem." After that correction, I now have three desktops all online with a DSL connection - but still have NO COMMUNICATION on my local network to let the machines talk to each other. That also means that one of the machines cannot access any of our four printers, and another has only the one printer that's on USB direct to that computer. For now, my weekly backups have to be done by copying to a "portable" USB HD for copy to backup via sneaker-net.

Downloads with the DSL hookup are about 5x as fast as with the old dial-up on average, with "peaks" at slightly higher rates; but nothing really up to the advertised speeds. If being able - finally - to check into YouTube is an advantage, I guess it's an improvement. ... (?). (My new connection is signifcantly faster - maybe 2x - than the "high speed" hook up at our main library, where I've gone to download "something really large" a couple of times.)

Still trying to get some help from the router guys. They are very insistent that you correctly specify and select "help" appropriate to your specific model, version, and firmware hardware, but then everything they show me for my HARD WIRED NON-WIRELESS CAPABLE router is "how to set up your wireless network."

I may have to get on the phone I guess ...

John