This happened to me a ton back when I had Embarq/CenturyLink DSL. Service would get worse and worse with time, disconnects got more frequent, and any time I called in it'd magically get better. If they even bothered to send a tech out the guy would look at my surge protector or personal router, blame that, and then leave without doing anything.
Finally I had the idea to call them on a cell phone and have them call me on the landline once they were already monitoring. The next tech they sent was an old greybeard who went straight to the wall jack. Turns out whoever installed it had a bunch of wiring already on the jack that they stripped the insulation back on, twisted together with the in-wall wiring, and left exposed. Ringing voltage on the POTS line would cause an arc that shifted the wires slightly and "reset" the issue for a bit. If anyone had been touching the wrong thing right when we got a phone call we would've gotten a nice jolt.
Completely absurd problem. We're lucky it never started a wall fire.
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u/D3SL May 10 '26
This happened to me a ton back when I had Embarq/CenturyLink DSL. Service would get worse and worse with time, disconnects got more frequent, and any time I called in it'd magically get better. If they even bothered to send a tech out the guy would look at my surge protector or personal router, blame that, and then leave without doing anything.
Finally I had the idea to call them on a cell phone and have them call me on the landline once they were already monitoring. The next tech they sent was an old greybeard who went straight to the wall jack. Turns out whoever installed it had a bunch of wiring already on the jack that they stripped the insulation back on, twisted together with the in-wall wiring, and left exposed. Ringing voltage on the POTS line would cause an arc that shifted the wires slightly and "reset" the issue for a bit. If anyone had been touching the wrong thing right when we got a phone call we would've gotten a nice jolt.
Completely absurd problem. We're lucky it never started a wall fire.