>...Jebus fuggin Crisp. And I thought our local provider was bad.
>What the actual fuck.

This is, alas, the kind of service one can expect around here. Verizon wasn't amazing? But they were at least an RBOC. The outfit they sold their New England landline operations to a few years ago, not so much, and the company that bought them last year, evidently even less so.

In a way, I get it. Because of the "common carrier" rule, they have to provide and maintain the physical plant here in their service area, but other signal providers (like the one I get my phone service and DSL through) can use it. This means that when someone like me has a problem with the physical line, when they send someone to repair it, they're helping their competitor. They're required by law to do so, but on an intellectual level, I can understand why there is something less than a fanatical level of motivation to get it done in a timely fashion.

OTOH, the whole reason they (or I guess technically their predecessors, now) lost me as a customer in the first place was because the services they were providing on this copper were bad and overpriced, so...

I've probably told this story before, and it's been so long that I may be misremembering some of the file details now, but basically: Back when Verizon still provided the land services around here, this house's original POTS and DSL service was through them. I actually had the EPU web server here in the house and operated it myself. To do that I had to be a "business" customer, because it was the only way to get a static IP address.

When Verizon sold their New England operations to FairPoint (hereinafter "FailPoint"), they didn't include their IP address blocks. Evidently no one at FailPoint noticed this or realized why it was important. (I am assuming Verizon's people knew full well, and did it on purpose to fuck their successors. They didn't spin off the ghost of NYNEX willingly, IIRC, it was part of a judicial quid pro to get approval for some other merger they wanted more.) Which meant that on the day of the handover, I, and presumably every other former Verizon DSL customer with a static IP, suddenly found myself without a working route to... well... anywhere, because I was using an IP address that belonged to a different provider.

OK, fine, stupid shit happens when you're messing around with backbone routing, I remember that from when I worked in network ops for Big ISPs. All FailPoint needs to do is assign me an address that they do own, and then I have to do a few things on my end, and job's a good'un. Pain in the ass, but no big deal.

They didn't have any.

They hadn't realized they would need them.

Their NOC strung me along for weeks with this shit. Oh, hang in there, we're getting some, don't worry. Normal service will be resumed shortly. Annnny day now. We've just hit a couple of teeny tiny little snags. Nothing major. ICANN is a harsh mistress!

(In fairness, ICANN is a harsh mistress, and often a moronic one. And in fairness to them, after their predecessor organizations handed out massive blocks of IPs like candy in the early days, they did have a pretty awkward bed to sleep in when the Web really took off and IPv4 addresses suddenly became an Obviously Finite Resource. But I digress.)

I put up with it for as long as I could stand, then eventually concluded that not only was I sick of their excuses, but also, they weren't going to be any better to deal with even if they eventually got it working; so I bailed to a competing regional provider, which I'm still with today, and presumably will be until and unless someone gets fiber working in this helltown.

BUT they, or now their successor company, still own the copper. And so.

>Here's hoping they get their shit together sooner rather than later.
>In the meantime, is there anything we as a community can do to help?

I can't think of anything offhand. There probably isn't anything anyone can do until and unless Consolidated pulls its finger out. Even if I switched providers again (and this is not my current provider's fault), the physical link is down and won't be coming back until they fix it. The only alternative would be to change to a different medium, and the only one I can think of that works around here is that jaw-droppingly expensive satellite service that used to come bundled with DirecTV, so that's not happening.

(Well, and theoretically switching to a more expensive data plan on my cellphone, but using that as my household Internet link is a clunky field-expedient thing in the first place.)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.