Another bout of phone problems
About a year and a half ago, I blogged about a time when I went for nearly a week without landline phone or internet service, since there are just too few technicians still around who are trained to deal with my apartment building’s old copper wiring instead of fiber optics. More recently, last September, I had another phone outage that turned out to be due to the old, really long phone cord I was using, or perhaps the old surge protector I had the line going through — something I forgot I’d done until after the technician replaced it with a new, heavier cord. (The phone jack is so far from my desk that I need a really long cord going around the walls, and I couldn’t get the old cord out from behind the bookcase where it was lodged, so we just left it there and put in the new one, and I cut off the accessible ends of it later.)
The latest bout of phone problems started a week and a half ago, when I discovered the phone line had gone dead overnight. This time, luckily, the internet connection still worked, though the router’s wi-fi was out and I could only connect through the ethernet cable. (This turned out to be a glitch I could fix by unplugging and rebooting the modem, though it took me a couple of days to figure that out, since I didn’t want to risk losing the connection I had.) Thus, I wasn’t too worried when the repair appointment got delayed.
Finally, a representative called and explained that they were having trouble scheduling a copper technician, and she suggested sending a fiber technician to hook me up to the fiber that’s now reached our street. She explained that this would give me faster, more stable service without all these outages. However, it was up to the building manager to decide whether to okay that, and apparently they had trouble reaching him or negotiating for the switchover. All I could do was wait to see whether they either resolved that and sent a fiber tech, or got around to sending a copper tech.
Days passed, and the internet started to act up. First, it went out for less than a minute, it seemed. Over the next few days, it went out at least twice, about 20-25 minutes each time; rebooting the modem didn’t help, but it came back on its own eventually. I started to wonder if this could be like the switching-station mixup last time — maybe somebody was switching something off and on that affected my connection. I called back the direct line of the representative to let her know about the new problem, but never heard back.
The resolution to all this was anticlimactic and confusing. I got a call this afternoon, and it was an automated message telling me the problem had been resolved — after eleven days of no landline phone service. At first, there was still no dial tone, but the recording suggested unplugging the unit and plugging it back in — which was probably in reference to the router, but I tried it with the phone cord anyway. I couldn’t get it out of the socket, but after I jiggled it around some, I heard the jarring sound you get when the phone’s been off the hook too long, and then after a bit, I got a dial tone again.
So, okay, it was working, but how? Why? What had been the problem? The automated message didn’t tell me. I decided to go outside and look around for a phone company truck, and I found one in the parking lot. Moments later, I saw the technician come out of a different building in the complex. I asked him about it, and it turned out he’d been working on someone else’s phone and knew nothing about my problem. All he could suggest was that maybe he jiggled a wire that somehow fixed my issue, but that seems unlikely given that he was in another building altogether. He also didn’t know anything about the fiber switchover.
So now my phone is working again, but I have no idea what was done to fix it or if I’m connected to the fiber-optic lines now. The internet does seem to be moderately faster now; at least a couple of sites that are usually slow to load for me (including Facebook) are now loading with notably less delay, but HBO Max is still loading as slowly as usual. So I can’t be sure what the cause of the speed improvement is. I mean, if they had switched the building to fiber, wouldn’t the tech have known about it? He was right here. It’s very confusing.
I guess one way to know is to wait for the power to go out in a storm or something. Fiber optics don’t carry power for phones the way copper wires do, so landlines won’t work during outages anymore, unless you buy a backup battery which costs a hundred bucks (I declined the offer). But I’m in no hurry for the power to go out. I guess I’ll just have to live with not knowing, and hope things stay stable.
