Broadband outages also tend to occur more frequently and to last longer, she adds. Last summer and fall, users on both coasts experienced loss of DSL service. Users had to wait for hours before their connections were restored. That same day, a faulty router gummed up the works for scores of Pacific Bell DSL customers in the San Francisco Bay Area. In early December, an outage knocked out service to some Pacific Bell customers for 35 minutes, the company says.
Some outages are more difficult to fix than others.
Late last September, Chris Arslanyan, a computer professional, ordered DSL service from Bell Atlantic Infospeed for his home in Oradell, New Jersey. It was installed a week later, but it didn't work. Five days and seven phone calls later the modem was up and running, he says, but four days after that it went down again. A pattern began to emerge. I spend many a Friday night waiting for the phone to ring, like I'm back in high school waiting for a girl to call.