Tales from the Past - Dealing with AT&T

Photo by Mika Baumeister on Unsplash

It seems we have always used AT&T. This is partially because we live near a massive cell tower, the landline situation was always reliable, and when you start combining items on a bill you can sometimes get discounts.

Of course a side effect of this is the junction box on the side of the house gets filled with more and more cables, even cable TV was routed through there, and as a rule the installers never remove the old wiring, and just add new stuff. Usually.

Now, we just use AT&T for our mobile phones and the Internet - landlines and cable television are long gone. Things are much cheaper this way. But in the past, every bizarre issue I've had with them usually boils down to me wanting something they don't have or want to do. It might seem like our phone service was down all the time, but we'd make changes every few years or there were outages that would occur. I mean, we've lived here for quite a while, so the stories add up. Here are a few tales of yore....

The Box Down the Street

About 100 yards from our house on a main street, there was the start of the last mile for phone service. The infamous box with tons of punchdowns and plenty of copper. I became acutely aware of this box over the years.

At one point we had four landlines coming into the house. There was the main number, the kid phone, a fax line, and the (dial-up) Internet line. Getting those four lines in was rather painful, as the simple box on the outside of the house did not have the space so they had to install a larger box. And this meant that for whatever reason, at that box down the street there was quite the odd set of wiring going on. It apparently looked like a business had been set up in the middle of a residential neighborhood.

Multiple times over several months, we would lose connectivity on two of the lines - the fax and the Internet. We'd call AT&T and they'd scratch their heads, and finally end up at that box down the street. There seemed to be the source of our problems. At first it was just "yeah problem was at the box down the street, we fixed it" and I left it at that. But after a while that was always the fix, so one time when they came out I said "maybe you should start at that box down the street because that is always the problem." Since the repair tech didn't see anything obvious, he went there and came back and said "yup that was the problem." So I asked him to explain it to me.

He said that the issue was that when it is wired up properly, it looks like a business and seems to be wired "wrong" and someone probably saw it when working on another job and decided to "fix" it. We discussed this and I suggested that he write a note and tape it in the box that says "this is a business, don't touch" or words to that effect. He did so and the problems ceased.

ISDN

We were the first in our entire neighborhood to get ISDN. After a while it was eventually a business setup with two ISDN circuits - one for two voice lines, and one for data. It was awesome. This replaced the main voice line and the Internet line, and we had much more reliable and faster Internet service as a result. It had started with Internet only, and since they wanted to save on wiring they tied it in with the existing junction box on the outside of the house. The ISDN box was just below the outside junction box. Eventually we had to add a second ISDN line, and when the service guy came out he thought it was a mistake and he removed the first ISDN box entirely. He also rewired the outside and managed to leave us with just the old fax line functioning.

The ISDN boxes are still there to this day. They attached one directly to the bricks.

When the repair guy came out, I already had the telco side of the outside junction box open. He was taken aback, but I simply stepped him through my setup and what I wanted. When he was done I would not left him leave until I not only checked the lines with my own clip-on handset, dialing up the test lines myself, I also checked in the house as well. He asked me if I had worked for the phone company before and I simply said "no" and said nothing else. He looked at me, I guess expecting a long diatribe, and finally kind of raised his eyebrows and sighed, “well…. ok then."

Another Handwritten Note

There has been a tendency for repair folk to come out and undo work I've done. On the box on the side of the house, there is the customer side and the telco side. Most modifications I would make were on the customer side, and even so it was not unusual for someone to "fix" something that wasn't broken. For example it was easier for me to run a second drop into the house from the box itself instead of installing some junction inside.

Eventually I physically cut some wires and re-ran through a different opening into the house than the original install. This especially came into play when we got DSL. I wanted the DSL line ran into the server room (one quarter of the garage that was made into a separate room). Nothing like a technician undoing my work and ruining my day when coming out for a simple repair. To solve this, I wrote my own note that was taped on the telco side which said "Call homeowner before doing any work" which saved massive headaches. After that was eventually ignored, I simply put a lock on the box.

This was from this week, before I pulled out some of the extra cables. My posting of this to Twitter brought on the comments that brought on this blog post.

Present Day

Landlines still exist in the world but are less common, those boxes on the outside of houses are now used for cable, and usually control over them happens at the AT&T office via software. It is rare that they are called out, as most diagnostics also take place remotely whenever there is a problem. These days in my working class neighborhood, home businesses are a lot more common - there is a paint company ran out of a house down the street, and a couple of blocks away someone has a plumbing company. Odds things at the box down the street are more common. But wow, a few years ago, I was lucky to be online at all.