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I was living in the Chicago and got one of the first DSL lines during the dot com bubble. It took 6 months to get it installed. They never charged us for it.

I was living in the Chicago and got one of the first DSL lines during the dot com bubble. It took 6 months to get it installed. They never charged us for it. Roughly a year later, we got a letter from their big four accounting firm saying that they were going bankrupt due to billing irregularities and our service would be terminated soon, but it was easy to get service then. We never paid a dime for it.

grogenaut 3y ago
We were in the first 100 customers to get dsl in STL. It took 1.5 years and escalating to a vice president to get it to work as both a phone line and dsl. Their billing system was miffed as dsl was commercial. My friends worked there and had oracle access (swbell) and could easily see the mismatch, but couldn't fix it. They ended up giving us our old dialup second phone line for free and dsl for free for 3 years to solve it. Wife also worked for att and dsl was cheap for them except the billing system swore my apt was in another county and would send the installers there constantly. Took 8 months and was only fixed when wife went on a tour of a facility and mentioned it to an engineer and their VP.
organsnyder 3y ago
Early DSL was such a shitshow. We went through two or three providers going under before it finally began to stabilize.
- giantrobot 3y ago
  In 2000 or thereabouts PacBell was promising ADSL at my apartment. I was well within range of the CO/DSLAM and everything seemed set but the technician could not get the modem to sync with a signal. Turned out the building's phone wiring was a rat's nest of twisted and taped RJ-11. It really sucked not to get anything faster than dial-up. It also explained why my dial-up couldn't connect reliably at 28k and I'd often be stuck with a 19k connection. The experience did teach me a lot about Squid as a caching proxy and using wget and screen to do overnight downloads (I didn't learn about whey's background flag until a few years later).

grogenaut 3y ago

We were in the first 100 customers to get dsl in STL. It took 1.5 years and escalating to a vice president to get it to work as both a phone line and dsl. Their billing system was miffed as dsl was commercial. My friends worked there and had oracle access (swbell) and could easily see the mismatch, but couldn't fix it. They ended up giving us our old dialup second phone line for free and dsl for free for 3 years to solve it. Wife also worked for att and dsl was cheap for them except the billing system swore my apt was in another county and would send the installers there constantly. Took 8 months and was only fixed when wife went on a tour of a facility and mentioned it to an engineer and their VP.

organsnyder 3y ago

Early DSL was such a shitshow. We went through two or three providers going under before it finally began to stabilize.

giantrobot 3y ago
In 2000 or thereabouts PacBell was promising ADSL at my apartment. I was well within range of the CO/DSLAM and everything seemed set but the technician could not get the modem to sync with a signal. Turned out the building's phone wiring was a rat's nest of twisted and taped RJ-11. It really sucked not to get anything faster than dial-up. It also explained why my dial-up couldn't connect reliably at 28k and I'd often be stuck with a 19k connection. The experience did teach me a lot about Squid as a caching proxy and using wget and screen to do overnight downloads (I didn't learn about whey's background flag until a few years later).