I had exactly this happen to me. After a week of explaining the issue, they finally threatened me with the cost of the lineman's visit if my computer was at fau

I had exactly this happen to me. After a week of explaining the issue, they finally threatened me with the cost of the lineman's visit if my computer was at fault ($1500). It had gotten so bad (128kbits) that I said I'd pay it in any case if they could just fix it. I didn't hear anything. The lineman missed his appointment and never showed and my ticket vanished from the system. The issue dragged on for 5 weeks. Finally I called a local cable provider and begged them for service. In a miracle of bureaucracy, the place I was renting had cable a decade ago and was so on their "served locations" list. They ran more than a mile of new cable and hooked me up. Months later I was talking to some local telephone linemen (we do a lot of T1 installs requiring truck rolls) and lo and behold, he knew exactly what had gone wrong. The DSLAM in our local exchange had gone bad and began running in degraded mode to compensate for the failure. AT&T decided that there just weren't enough subscribers to justify fixing it right away. It was scheduled to be repaired in 18 months. Edit: My takeaway from the entire episode is that you are so impossibly far away from the reality of boxes and wires when you're on those tech support lines that you might as well be trying to direct the mars rover from your back yard with a megaphone.