gusherb
Well-known member
When my mother opened her business in 2003 they originally got four phone lines and a little later added DSL to that. In the Bridgeport neighborhood in Chicago the copper network everywhere was (and still is) a disaster. One of the lines was always going down and it took two years of constant service calls just to get the DSL to not re-sync all the time.
Usually they would go down because the lazy techs working on the neighbors buildings in the alley wouldn't check to make sure the pair they were touching wasn't already live and would just steal it for one of the neighbors...or just disconnect it. Sometimes 2 lines would go down at once.
It was a constant battle. Sometime around 2008-9 those issues stopped happening and it was pretty stable until i finally decided to have the internet and lines switched over to Comcast.
Later on I figured out the reason the lines stopped failing all the time was because all the other residences and businesses dumped AT&T and went to Comcast! So those lazy bum techs don't come out nearly as much. We later got an AT&T line for supplement to the VoIP (ended up going away from Comcast and doing standalone VoIP) and the line has been trouble free for almost 2 years now.
When the tech was installing it he found just 6 lines that were still active with service, when back in 2003 there would've been closer to 25 active lines out of the terminal that our drop to the building comes out of (the building alone had six POTS lines total in 2003). I do remember seeing linemen come down the alley working on something or another almost every day back then.
Usually they would go down because the lazy techs working on the neighbors buildings in the alley wouldn't check to make sure the pair they were touching wasn't already live and would just steal it for one of the neighbors...or just disconnect it. Sometimes 2 lines would go down at once.
It was a constant battle. Sometime around 2008-9 those issues stopped happening and it was pretty stable until i finally decided to have the internet and lines switched over to Comcast.
Later on I figured out the reason the lines stopped failing all the time was because all the other residences and businesses dumped AT&T and went to Comcast! So those lazy bum techs don't come out nearly as much. We later got an AT&T line for supplement to the VoIP (ended up going away from Comcast and doing standalone VoIP) and the line has been trouble free for almost 2 years now.
When the tech was installing it he found just 6 lines that were still active with service, when back in 2003 there would've been closer to 25 active lines out of the terminal that our drop to the building comes out of (the building alone had six POTS lines total in 2003). I do remember seeing linemen come down the alley working on something or another almost every day back then.
