** Reply to message from "Lewis G Rosenthal"
<os2-wireless_users@2rosenthals.com> on Wed, 31 Jan 2007 14:21:39 -0500

Lew, I fought this exact problem with Qwest a year or so back: strong signal at
the box, marginal to no signal at the modem.  The DSL modem I have has built-in
signal analysis and it would go from a downstream SNR of 2 up to 16-20 in a
matter of minutes.  Upstream SNR was consistently in the 28-32 range.  They
showed up and measured a DOWN/UP SNR of 18/30 at the service entry point so I
plugged in my modem with nothing else attached and got a barely usable 6/30
reading.  AHA! Bad modem.  Now, by a quirk in Qwest's shipping, I wound up with
3 of these modems so I swapped in a new one - 8/30. Swapped in the third one
and got 10/30, so I left it in.  For the next two months, that modem ran with
anywhere from 6/25 to 12/30 SNR.  One day, up popped a SNR of 18/30 and the
downstream attenuation remain above 15 ever after. Swapped to original "bad"
modem back in and what do you know - 17/30!

I pulled the logs for all this time and made a rather interesting discovery: the bad signals exactly tracked the gateway machine I was assigned.  I called a
friend at Qwest and he checked their records - they had swapped equipment on
that server for weak signal just after all my problems. Looks like the problem
was fairly far upstream from me after all.

The Verizon service personnel just left. After several tests, it appears that the primary connection is functioning normally once again. However, there are some additional steps which I will be taking in the coming days to improve performance of both lines, though the signal loss from the Verizon termination at the house (the "demarc) is minimal. Verizon has closed this ticket.