Last year, the sixth seal was broken and at&t rose from the ashes of the baby Bells, which in turn resulted from the sacrificial burning of AT&T. It’s in the Bible. I swear. Can’t find it? Try the Qu’ran. No? Keep looking.
Anyway, a lot of people have laughed at the irony. All that time and money wasted on prosecuting and breaking up the monopoly, only to see it reforged. But it’s a different world, you say? That’s right – instead of controlling just phones, now a huge company with unlimited resources can control phone, television, and internet. Really, I think only sign language and blinking are left at this point. But they’re different, you say – they’ve learned how to be a big company without all the badness, and they’ve changed. Well, I’ll agree with the change: AT&T has become at&t. Very web 2.0.
Why am I so testy? Well, I was already pissed at SBC before they re-became at&t. Witness the long episode of internet pain and woe that I went through a few years back [1]. The NERD experiment, proposed to study why my DSL modem from SBC needed to by power-cycled most often between 10 am and 1 pm in order to maintain service, was de-funded after it was learned that equivalent bit-rates could be achieved with an older Speedstream modem from Earthlink.
Yesterday, at&t betrayed me for the first time. From 1 pm until about 6 am this morning, not only was our DSL non-functional, it was teasing. When it could obtain its assigned IP address, most often the name servers were unavailable from at&t. That meant that I could see the internet, but not get to any domains. It also meant nobody could get to cooleysekula.net. Most of the time, the DSL wouldn’t even respond with an IP address. The bright side of all this was an excellent tech support guy named Jack who spent 30 minutes on the phone with me troubleshooting. By the time I called him, I’d already tried two modems, two DSL cables, and two ethernet cables. No combination solved the problem, suggesting it was at&t’s problem. Jack confirmed that line tests were failing, and that it was likely somehow connected to a massive network outage in San Jose. Sigh.
On the bright side, I have a new theory: the Apple iPhone, which is served by at&t, somehow managed to take San Jose’s DSL system down with the rapid increased usage of at&t’s network. Heh.
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