Good news about my connection, sorta...

When I moved into my new place, I had a real tough time with my DSL service, and keeping it stable. It turned out that I had issues with my phone line that required my provider to dial down the DSL profile from 3M/800K to 2.5M/600K (bits) if I wanted to maintain any sort of stability. This really frustrated me, because I paid an arm and a leg for getting my home wired for phone and ethernet (had no choice — I really wanted to go DIY on the cabling). On top of the DSL issues, my phones would actually break out into static just randomly throughout the day. You'd be mid-call, and then PSHHHSHHSHHHHHHHSHHH — you can barely hear the other person on the line. I needed to figure out what the heck was wrong. So, it turns out that the dumbass that installed my phone wiring actually terminated all my cables by hand-twisting the groups of ring & tip lines, to which I had no choice but to hand-twist another line for my DSL connection in the basement (because I also had to move the modem). Obviously, this was a non-ideal connection, but I had no choice. Recently, I wanted to revisit this issue, and re-wire my termination point to a punch-down block. I double-checked, and all the wiring had NO extra cable run for me to strip and install onto the block. He left large coilings everywhere else in the house to "future-proof" the areas, except for the phone lines. Moron. To add some salt to the wound, I emailed a buddy who also bought from the same builder, and had the same phone installer do his place. Sure enough, he got the whole nine yards. Punch-down block and all. Nice. I tried contacting this installer guy via email to no avail. When he invoiced me, email worked just fine for him — I suppose people just tend to work quicker when money's on the line. I just haven't had the time to actually call him on the phone yet to ask him what was up. One of these days… So, what was I to do in order to correct this problem? Well, if the only issue I had was a faulty connection, I had just the idea. You see, the wiring was messy, but it should still work when wired in that fashion. A punch-down block would only allow me to add more lines and service points, and keep the wiring organized. I broke out my trusty soldering iron, and a big roll of solder, and I made a nice solder joint out of the hand-twisted collection of wires. Boy did this work out well! All my static on the phone went away immediately. Time for a call to the DSL company! I got the tech support guys to bump my profile back to 3M/800K, and everything looks nice and solid now. You may or may not notice a pretty big speed-up accessing this site now. Yay! Now I'm going to look at bumping up to a 5M/800K profile for a few more bucks a month. We'll see how that goes.