Our DSL connection here is through DSL Extreme, althought Verizon handles the wiring. We’ve been havin intermittent problems, where it will work perfectly (3Mb/s) all day, and then around 6PM, it starts going really slow and hanging.

So I call DSL Extreme. The first time I’m connected to an idiot who finds nothing wrong, and heck there is nothing wrong at the time. He tells me to call back if I have a problem. Grrr. But a few days later I call back while it’s actually bad, and they tell me they can se something wrong and they have to send in Verizon.

A few days later, a Verizon tech arrives to look at the external wiring. After some poking around, he declares there is no problem up to the connection on the panel (which is in the garage), and since my phone works then that’s the end of his responsibility. More grr!

So they are basically saying that something is wrong between the wiring block at the panel downstairs, and the modem. The panel looks like this:

And the wiring inside the house looks like this:

Yay fun! I had to buckle down, and actually figure out where all the wires went. In the end it turned out to be relativly simple. A phone line is just two wires. We have six wires coming into the house, in three pairs (orange, green and blue). Only the incoming orange wires are actually used here. Since I only use one phone socket in the house (for DSL + wireless phone base station) I simply cut away all the other wires, so all I had were two wires going directly from the panel to the socket that was in use.

In the end though, I’m not sure that was the problem. I think the problem was this:

This is a wiring block. The wire from the phone company comes in on the left. The wires to the condo are on the right. See the orange wires labed 4 & 0 (for 407), that’s my phone line. The bit of metal is a bridge clip, which makes a connection between left and right. Only here, the bottom one (of my set) is not pushed on correctly, and seems to be barely making contact with the right hand side.

So I pulled it off, pushed it on firmly in the right place, and my DSL has worked fine ever since.

What bugs me is that the Verizon guy tested all the way to the left hand side of this wiring block. If he’d tested the right hand side (or just looked at the clip), then he would have found the problem. But his responsibility ended half an inch from the actual problem.