Coming To You From 56K-Ville

So the DSL modem went into what turned out to be its death throes last night, its panel of three LEDs raging in a blinky fluttering show of red and orange and green desperation.

I unplugged the thing and let it sit a bit before reconnecting it, but that didn’t help things. Then I pulled out all the ethernet and phone cables and let it sit some more but it seemed the hardware had come to its end at the sad young age of 2.

Too soon. Waaaaaay too soon.

This morning. Nothing. Not even the faintest blip of light emitting diode flashed and so I called AT&T’s tech support and after getting connected to “Jeff” in Banganila and dutifully redoing the steps I’d already done he declared the 2Wire 1701HG Gateway deceased, and without even so much as giving me a chance to grieve over its corpse offered to send me a new and improved 2Wire 2701HG “free” if I upgraded my account… which meant a price bump of about five bucks a month.

No thanks, bastards.

I’m pretty sure they killed it with some sort of self-destruct code sent from an underground bunker in Bangor. Or maybe Bangalore. Damn them.

But I’m not getting suckered into their scheme. Instead I hauled out the old lapper and plugged in a phone line and did the old dial-up thing, the 56K-speed connection screech brrrrp sound bringing back memories of the early ’90s. Then I promptly (meaning “glacially” in terms of surfing speed) found a bigbox store nearby that has the new 2Wire 2701HG unit and I’ll be picking that up today on my way back from a job fair down in Anaheim.

UPDATED (9:33 a.m.): Wow, I actually resurrected the 6-year-old Apple Airport base station that’s apparently too old and obsolete to be effected by AT&T’s Biennial Gateway Decimatrix Pulse. I’m still cruising the internuts at 56K, but at least the lapper ain’t tethered to a phone cord.

UPDATED (3:58 p.m.): New wireless router/modem installed. Ahhhh. Much better.

UPDATED (7:00 p.m.): Might I add that my term “Biennial Gateway Decimatrix Pulse” is my new favorite invention ever. I might even get it put on a shirt.

3 Responses to “ Coming To You From 56K-Ville ”

Comments:

Julia says:
July 31st, 2007 at 2:13 pm

I feel you. Same thing happened to me last fall and I had Earthlink deal with it all. My DSL modem went kaput and Earthlink first told me, “Oh, that’s an old modem you have, we don’t support it anymore. You’ll have to BUY a new one.” It took me many phone calls and escalations on those phone calls to finally get someon to agree that it was insane for me to have to pay for something I didn’t break that they no longer support and required I get a new one. Then they were going to charge me DSL rates while it took 3 weeks to get the new one (and I was on dial up) AND charge me for minutes I used on said dial up over my 20 allotted dial up minutes. I made a polite fuss and didn’t budge and didn’t get charged for any of it.

I was unemployed at the time. And clearly I needed to get that off my chest, lo these 10 months later….whew!

Steve Nordquist says:
November 19th, 2007 at 8:08 pm

If you haven’t already sent it to the Worlds Least Efficient Lead Suppressors, you can almost certainly ressurect it with a replacement of the power brick. Any 5V 2A supply (e.g. an extension off the one in a Mac) will do.

Mine did that after less than a year! It’s 2 years now though, and now mine is just giving me 3 red lamps; perhaps the Flash memory in it wore out and thus it fails self-tests? Let people know if you found the AT&T reuse center that takes these back, the fix, etc.

And ah…you might need to add either a captcha or javascript puzzle authenticator for that adsl definitive person.

[sic]