Seems that my plan to just sit on hold with tech support so that I could actually get some work done on the net last night has backfired. Where as late as 11:30 pm, I could get 0% packet loss to Cavtel's DNS server, according to the morning crew, the network techs "sorted it all out" last night and now I can't get any signal at all even while on the phone. "David" said that the trouble ticket has been "taken over" by the network team, and that I should be hearing from them today. He took a few moments to read over the ticket, and said that it had been determined that my IP address should be 64.83.19.100, which it has been for quite a few years. When I agreed with him, he started stammering and then admitted that someone had written 64.83.191.100 on the original ticket, and it hasn't been corrected. *sigh*
I called right back a few minutes later and got Ryan [Cox, apparently] with whom I was able to establish that the previous call had actually been logged. Hey, don't laugh, I've got very limited faith at this point. Whatever the techs "sorted out" last night also "fixed" my modem, which is flashing a pattern now - all lights on, then only power and test, then flickering, then off except for power light, repeat.
This is the first time I've had any issue here they could actually recognize, so Ryan assured me that they would ship out a replacement modem ASAP.
We went round and round about this, so let me explain - I was one of the early adopters for Cavtel's service, and pushed for DSL service with quite a few of my clients, so I have spent a lot of time troubleshooting their modems, and have typically driven over to the office on Laburnam to pick up replacement modems in person. Over the years, it's gone from being an easy meeting in the lobby with friendly techs to something like a bizarre illicit rendezvous with high security one way glass, intercoms and terrified lackeys edging out the door, but I was always able to get a modem. Not this time.
Ryan tells me that they can't, there are no modems in the building, it's against policy, they outsourced all modem shipments, and besides, they aren't in that building anymore. I want to speak to a supervisor, there aren't any, but he'll give me his direct phone number and an email address for a supervisor. He also invited me to call customer care, and gave me their phone number, and I had him repeat both that and the direct line, just in case. The address he gave me is his own email address, and when I called the direct line later, it was "invalid." Are they really all unsupervised over there?
Well, some "progress" has been made, at least I've now got verifiable modem light flashing patterns that even the first tier techs can understand, and Ryan assured me that they are going to ship a new one to me right away, which means 2 or 3 more days of this, so maybe there's hope - distant, tenuous and vague, but hope...
Meanwhile, I'm racking up the expenses of hanging out in various net-cafe's, after begging bandwidth at several different clients when on tech-support calls. I'm starting to move list subscriptions off my cavtel.net address, just in case. While I'm at it, I've run ping and traceroute from a few other locations - turns out several of the cafe's are using the Cave as well - and on the southside I still see the same pattern. Trace is breaking in the same place, and there's no ping to my IP. Interesting note - I'm also seeing weird packet loss all the way from the west coast when checking through dslreports.com. I'll have to log some of those, they're breaking up as soon as they hit the edge servers on the Cave's network.