Thin Pipe, Part 4: The Quixotic Quest for DSL

I have a friend in town that is also a techie / internet junkie. He lives a couple miles away, closer to the center of town, where DSL is now available. Our town was late to the game to get DSL, we probably didn't get it anywhere in town until about 2005 or so. From what I am told actually, we did not get touch-tone phone service in town until the mid to late 1980s, long after everyone else had forgotten about rotary dialing. There are only about 1500 houses or so in town, and it's close to 50 square miles in size, 72 miles of roads, very low density. Not attractive at all to cable, DSL, or Fiber providers, and even the phone company takes it's time doing things out here it seems.

Rumor has it that the local Cable TV company tried to come into town and wire us up in the late 1980s, but our telephone poles were too short, not enough space available to separate all the services on the pole. The town fought with the cable company over who would pay for all the pole upgrades, the cable company said "see-ya", and the rest is history. If you look at a cable coverage map for our area, we are the missing puzzle piece. And the likelihood of them coming back now in the current economy is exactly zero.

But I digress, I was talking DSL, wasn't I? My friend ended up getting DSL back when we both had dial-up. Verizon has a little web form where you can enter your phone number, and it would tell you if you were eligible for DSL service. At first anyone in town who tried to put their phone number into that form got a message saying:

"Sorry, we don't offer service to your area currently. Please enter your contact information so we can inform you when service is available".


One day though, he tried the form out and it told him he was eligible for DSL, and they hooked him up. My friend is the type of guy who is sure to gloat about stuff like this, so he was immediately showing off his fast connection and talking all the time about how great his DSL service was. I kept logging in, getting the "sorry" message, then entering my contact info into the form, kind of like a write-in protest ballot. I even called them up and asked if they could connect me somehow, but the main issue was always the same. DSL works to about 2-3 miles from the central office, I live 4+ miles away.

I continued to log into the Verizon site periodically, entering my telephone info to see if I was eligible, adding my name to the "to be contacted when service is available" list. I would use different family members, neighbors, different versions of my first and middle name to mix it up, in the hope that Verizon would see this huge demand for internet service in town and extend things.

Sometimes, we would go to a local store like Circuit City (remember Circuit City?) and there would be a bunch of guys sitting at the Verizon Internet kiosk there, like Carneys at the Midway, trying to lure people in to the ring toss.

"Interested in High Speed Internet Service? FiOS? DSL?" they would ask as I tried to walk past. 9 times out of 10 I would succumb to my inner rage, and I would stop and say "Sure. set me up."

They would then ask for my zip code. The huge black no-coverage square would appear over our town on their little kiosk computer map, then they would look crestfallen and say "sorry no FiOS in your area yet. Are you interested in DSL?"

"Sure" I would say. Then they would check my phone number, look even more crestfallen, and say "uh, sorry, we can't provide it to your house, you're too far away from your central office."

"What can you provide us with for internet then?" I'd ask.

"Um.. sorry, nothing." (not true actually, they would sometimes offer me T1 service, but that is ridiculous enough that it deserves it's own blog post.)

Anyway, I am not sure why I would do this to myself again and again, insanity maybe. They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. I guess there was some small measure of pleasure in making a Verizon employee uncomfortable. (but, now that I think about it, he was probably a Circuit City employee. Sorry dude.) Somehow in my mind it all added up to some Verizon future-coverage-planning-manger being besieged by letters from their retail affiliates telling horror stories about how embarrassing it was to have people from our town constantly asking for service. Insanity.

But like the Man of LaMancha, I would joust at the proverbial DSL windmill from time to time over the years. In the process of bugging Verizon in various ways to provide DSL to me, I did manage to talk to a few of their field guys, and I discovered that there is actually a way for a telco to extend it's DSL service, using something called an ADSL Loop Extender. It goes on your telephone line, amplifies the signal, extends the range. Rural telcos in the mid-west use these to get service to their customers.

I also talked to a guy who suggested I move my telephone service to the neighboring town's exchange, which was actually closer than my own town. Our phone number would change, but I'd get DSL that way. But despite many calls to Verizon trying to find someone who would listen to the idea of adding an ADSL loop extender or changing my exchange, I had no success.

Short side subject.. There are a bunch of you who by now, (it is Issue 4 after all) probably want to know: why the hell don't you just move if internet is so important to you? Or maybe, why did you move there in the first place? I can feel you all thinking that. Good questions, deserving of answers. I'll do a little Q&A on that in a future post, stay tuned.

Now, back to DSL. Flash forward to the present day. I'm nervously watching the bandwidth meter tick away on my Verizon MIFI service, hoping my "normal" internet service will be restored someday soon. I decide that this would be a good time to once again call up Verizon, and make ten-tupley sure that they don't have some way to provide me with DSL they forgot to mention.

I decide to try the business services office, perhaps they would run DSL lines from the neighboring town to me. On trips to get pizza over there I'd count the poles between us and the town border; I'm 36 poles away from glory. How much could it cost to have someone string a cable line or DSL or something over to me? Or if not, maybe they would go for that repeater thing.

It took some initial navigating through the Verizon phone maze to get to a real person, and when I did, I launched into my spiel (thank god for Google, letting me know how to spell 'spiel', I wanted to add a 'ch' in there somehow) about how I live in a town with no internet, actually no internet near me, and it's a residence but really, I have my own business (True- I do video production, but the money I sink into it never matches what comes out so it's a 'business', as in, a hobby.) And so I'm looking for high speed internet options for my business. I take a breath. She recovers, after a few ummm... moments.

We start down the DSL road, and I quickly have to go into the whole too-far thing, and then into my various proposals to solve said problem, including the ADSL repeater, and/or moving me to another exchange. The lady on the phone shoots down the move-to-another-exchange option in short order. "We can't move you to another exchange, because we have to bill you in the town where you live."

"Go ahead and bill me in the town where I live. I just want a connection via the neighboring town."

"We can't do that, we're not set up for it."

There was some polite back and forth, but the Windmill did not move. It wasn't really a technical issue, it was an administrative one, something you really can't make any headway on, at least if you're a tech/nerd guy like me. Next up was the ADSL repeater idea, which I pitched. The (I suppose predictable) response was something like,

"I'm not sure what that is, I've never heard of it."

"Lot's of Rural Telco's use them. They extend the DSL range. I have some info I can send you.."

"I really can't help you with this, we don't offer that product. You will have to talk to our Service department because it's a technical question."

I had fallen into this trap before with Verizon. The handoff into oblivion. Unless you get an internal phone number of some sort, you get transferred to the main menu, and you call in to some central office and start all over again.

"OK, I say.. but are you transferring me to someone local to my area who can answer the question?"

"It's our main service number."

"But... They're probably not the ones who know if this can be installed on my line, are they? Can you transfer me to someone who handles our town?"

"That's who I have to transfer you to, they'll have to help you from there."

And back I went into the main menu maze, found the service department for business customers, and had a very similar conversation with the service guys, who eventually said I needed to call the business sales office with my questions since it was a sales issue.

I hung up, drained by the effort. Of all the Quixotic games I play with Verizon, this is the least satisfying one. I have no idea why I do it, screwing with the Circuit City guys is much more satisfying.

Things were about to look up a bit though, because the next day, I got a call from Mark, our new Internet Overlord.

Next Time: Thin Pipe, Part 5: Mark, our Internet Overlord