Hey Macguyver. Our new modem is an Arris BGW210-700; the prior one was also an earlier Arris, though I forget exactly which model. That is an interesting thought about terminating the lines earlier, to improve stability. I suppose that makes sense though as long, unused cables would be nothing more than antenna for stray noise. It doesn't apply directly to us, unfortunately, as we have numerous neighbors beyond us who have service. The houses do thin out pretty quick after us, so perhaps there's a point further down where that would make sense.
lol...12 departments: I totally believe that number. Customer Service is what ultimately drove us to try Sonic years ago: even though we're still dependent on AT&T, having our first point of contact be someone other than AT&T is a spectacular improvement for mental health(though I've truly felt bad for Sonic during this latest issue, since they're in a no-win position when AT&T fails repeatedly). What kills me is the apparent lack of proactive maintenance on the part of AT&T. They obviously have remote diagnostics abilities, and their head-ends should see when clients are dropping offline or seeing increased error rates. It seems only logical that a company would have spent the last couple decades building a process to identify quality issues *before* the customer is forced to complain. Just like the fact that they knocked my relative's internet offline and was completely unaware; or in fact last year took my pair for someone else, knocking me offline(that's what took 9 days to restore). In 30 years, they haven't realized this is an issue and built the systems to prevent it? Obviously this isn't rare. I'm sure there's many ways to do that: how hard would it be to put a barcode(or QR, nowadays) on each junction box, and the first step of the repair process be to scan that, and have the head-end snapshot all services running across that path so at the end they can both verify improvement and look for degradation? <grumble> Ah well.
lol...12 departments: I totally believe that number. Customer Service is what ultimately drove us to try Sonic years ago: even though we're still dependent on AT&T, having our first point of contact be someone other than AT&T is a spectacular improvement for mental health(though I've truly felt bad for Sonic during this latest issue, since they're in a no-win position when AT&T fails repeatedly). What kills me is the apparent lack of proactive maintenance on the part of AT&T. They obviously have remote diagnostics abilities, and their head-ends should see when clients are dropping offline or seeing increased error rates. It seems only logical that a company would have spent the last couple decades building a process to identify quality issues *before* the customer is forced to complain. Just like the fact that they knocked my relative's internet offline and was completely unaware; or in fact last year took my pair for someone else, knocking me offline(that's what took 9 days to restore). In 30 years, they haven't realized this is an issue and built the systems to prevent it? Obviously this isn't rare. I'm sure there's many ways to do that: how hard would it be to put a barcode(or QR, nowadays) on each junction box, and the first step of the repair process be to scan that, and have the head-end snapshot all services running across that path so at the end they can both verify improvement and look for degradation? <grumble> Ah well.