11:00 p.m. — Island Tel High Speed Internet network completely down for approx. 10 minutes. This follows on the heels of two major outages on Friday.
11:15 p.m. — Network briefly comes back up.
11:20 p.m. — Network still flaky. 50% packet loss to everywhere, include the ITAS gateway. Place call to technical support.
11:27 p.m. — On hold waiting for someone to answer technical support for 7 minutes and 58 seconds. Note that they have replaced old instrumental rendition of James Taylor song with instrumental rendition of Billy Joel song for on-hold entertainment. Not sure which is more annoying.
11:28 p.m. — Brusk Watts employee cum Island Tel technical support guy comes on the line. Claims problems are cleared up. I protest 50% packet loss. He says problems are cleared up. He says reset my modem. I protest 50% (not 100%) packet loss. He says they’re aware of the problem and someone is working on it. He says no more. I say thank you (why, I don’t know). Call over.
11:32 p.m. — Now experiencing 75% packet loss. Starting to panic that will have no Internet for the night despite much work to complete. Resolve to call Eastlink in the morning. All goodwill from early hopeful calls from Island Tel people after last frustration used up. Stark disbelief that any company can stay in business this long — even run ads in the paper claiming they’re e-business experts — with such completely crappy product and technical support. How do they sleep at night?
11:39 p.m. — Even though I know it’s a stupid idea, go down to basement to reset DSL modem. Note no water in basement; good sign. Come back upstairs. Still running about 50% packet loss. Place another call to technical support. Amazed that phones still work.
11:40 p.m. — Amazingly enough, technical support line answered on first ring. Oddly enough, end up talking to same guy. Guy admits that I didn’t have to reset my modem and that there’s a system-wide problem causing packet loss on the network. Claims it should be all okay by morning. Says someone is working on the problem right now. Two statements seem to be in conflict. Say thank you. End of call.
12:36 a.m. — Still experiencing same problems. Glad Island Tel is not running the highway system.
1:04 a.m. — Into the second hour of downtime now.
1:20 a.m. — Network seems to be back up and funtioning now. Feeling chastened.