Dang! Lost all phone and internet Sat afternoon,
Looks like one of the neighbors dug a hole for a fence post and
cut the phone lines, Phone company said they may have it fixed by Thursday!!!

Dang.

Bummer. That assumes that they fix it properly the first time. It often takes a few runs at it before they get it right.

Dial 811 is a free service in Georgia. They are fast and will check anywhere on your property. Sure, they leave goofy markers and paint all over your yard, but that SHOULD be enough of a clue for would-be ditch diggers. There really is no excuse for cutting a pipe or cable.

Where I come from....I would be liable had I not contacted all the utilities..."JULIE".....and would have to pay for the repairs and possible claims from customers that lost their service.

Stan

With today's standard you are not responsible for anything anymore. Unless of course if you can't blame it on your parents/society/gas prices or some popular negative effect on human life........

Gabor....You are correct. Its always someone else's fault. I am going digging!

I'm on loan to the loop crew and I may be doing just that today .

Cutting peoples phone lines?

.

Boy , could I tell you stories .... One summer I had a 6 month contract running a Ditch Witch trencher replacing underground phone lines that had been damaged

It is amazing how much stuff is buried underground , even in the middle of nowhere. Back in the 1970's the fiber optics cable guys would purposely avoid populated areas because they were going from one end of the continent to the other. Try telling that to a farmer out in the boondocks .... ... one guy shut down western Canada when he severed a fiber optics line while digging in some water lines. They sent him a bill for $100,000 for repairs , and he got off lucky , all the banks and hospitals lost communication for 3 days , lucky nobody sued him

A guy hired to cut grass along the highway knocked over a phone line pedestal ... not usually a big deal ... it is usually just a splice to a nearby home or something .... but in this case it was a 2 pair copper line that carried a radio station signal to their broadcast tower. If he had reported it no problem , it would be just an accident , but he did not and his insurance ended up paying huge bucks for 2 days of lost revenue for the radio

Pipelines too .... a rancher out in the remote prairie was digging in fence posts and had nicked the edge of a high pressure gas line , it cut through the corrosion proof coating and 10 years later the rust had weakened it so much it exploded. He got sued for millions.

"Call before you dig" ... is good advice , usually no charge , and it lets you off the hook if something goes wrong. Like I said , it is unbelievable how much stuff is buried out there , and in the most unlikely places.

Try to picture two pair buried copper lines connecting every home and business and phone exchange on the continent .... it is like a spider web

Its the other guys fault....I am gone digging!

That is only if you are on the DNC list as a donor and a straight line party voter.

Wow the internet came back! Yay!

I used to work with a company that provided a large majority of the Internet connectivity in the US. Sometimes I would ask Customer Service to tell me the "best call of the day."

One of my favorites was a guy who called up one of the end-user providers and said, "The Internet is down. I took my laptop over to my friend's house and it is down over there too, so it must be everywhere. I thought someone ought to know."

So, Saturday, the neighbors had an upgrade in their cable internet service. MY internet went down at exactly the same time.
Called the company and told them what I thought happened. "did you turn it off and on again" was the response. I assured them that I had done everything I could do and that the man had cut the line.
Sure enough, the next day a van shows up. The service guy said I was right ( I love that) and proceed to assure me that he would be done soon and be on his way.


Then, I decided to have a little chit chat with him. Long story short...(too late?)

Anyway, my service was upgraded to 50MB downloads 10MB uploads MINIMUM Wi-Fi, new box, dual band, and no charge. How the heck did I get that lucky?

Hah! The most I can get from Bellsouth (AT&T) is 6 meg down and 410k up!
Even if I got what you got AT&T would throttle throughput as it appears they are doing to me now.
Pages used to load bang zip at the same 6 meg but it takes longer now.
Speedtest indicates I'm still getting the 6meg so it has to be throttling.

I have a gateway pos laptop, It hates my e mail at Hotmail it hates youtube & any media imbeds on other sights (even wolverine vids) How do I get my old good sites back ,Cant even get any good I heart radio with Rush'
I feel some fucked up Obozo liberal supporter designed this piece of crap.

Speedtests only give you the upstream/downstream to the (usually nearest or fewest hops) testing server. Typically, there are bottlenecks between you and your target websites that are farther along the chain than that. The only way to really know what is going on is to run a good traceroute utility. What you usually find is that there is a long delay when you are on one trunk system and the site is on another with the greatest delay at the intersection router. Not much you can do about that. Occasionally the grand exhaulted Internet network administrators put in a stupid route, that sends your content bouncing around from city to city to get to you, but -usually- that kind of thing is temporary and gets fixed when it is detected.

If your provider is on an AT&T backbone and the site you want to view is on a Sprint backbone...oh well. Take up knitting. Traceroute will show it...Speedtest will only show you how "wonderful" the service is to the nearest server on the same backbone. It is rarely throttling, although that does happen occasionally in rare instances.

Had a similar experience in May of 2014... I have AT&T U-verse (HD TV comes down a fast DSL line).

Called them out because the TV went down. The service guy found ants in the box on the side of the house (yeah, I should have looked but did not). I ask if he can just give me a new box. He says they have a newer technology, do I want it? We discuss details for a bit... and I get a FULL upgrade of ALL the AT&T stuff at my home... And now I have 12M down and 2+ up... according to the speed test. Previously I had 6-7M up and around 1.25-1.3 down. TV works better also.

AT&T is costly... however that level of customer service, along with I can count on one hand the times it has been out in over 3 years... is worth it.
Personally, I do not need faster than 12M down... I probably do not use that much often.