DSL trouble resolved?

Sorry not to be updating this blog more. Partly it’s that I’ve been terribly busy the last two months (it’s sort of the busy season at work). And partly it’s because of microblogs like twitter and time-wasting walled-gardens like Facebook. But mainly, it’s been because of my DSL, which has been horribly unreliable.

I dare to think that it might have been resolved now.
What happened was that there was a real, genuine problem with the line between my house and the pedestal in the neighbor’s yard. The Verizon guy came out one two occasions and did all kinds of repairs there. In hindsight, that would have fixed the problem.

But it didn’t. And the reason is that before he ever got sent out, Verizon Central HQ sent me a new DSL modem to replace the old one. I guess they’re cheaper than the cost to roll a truck.

I installed the new modem, and when it didn’t solve the problem, they finally dispatched a human being, who tested the line where it went into my house and then spent a couple of days fixing the cables in my yard.

But that didn’t fix the problem either. This morning, the Verizon tech came by again. He was looking at the logs in the DSL modem, and noticed they exactly mirrored the described behavior. Every minute or two, the modem would drop the DSL connection and spend 20-30 seconds restablishing it.

We talked a bit about whether I needed a new new modem, and then suddenly a light bulb came on in his head. He said, “I know what this is!” and dove under the desk to where the DSL modem sat there blinking at us. He unplugged the power cable from the back of the unit, traced the cable back to the power-outlet strip, and unplugged the power brick. Then he held it up and said, “Read what the power output is.”

I read it: “AC 10.5V.”

Then he handed me the DSL modem. “Read it.”

“12V.”

So that was the problem. (I hope.) When the new modem came, I didn’t install the new power brick, but kept using the old one from the old modem. (I could make an excuse here about how cluttered my work area was and it was an honest mistake because of all the different parts, but probably what happened was that I was lazy.)

Well, I still don’t know the first thing about electricity, but I did learn one important

Moral: don’t plug a device that requires 12V DC into a power adapter that supplies 10.5V AC. Unless you’re okay with intermittent internet service.

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