Fun with Verizon Tech Support

I have had awesome experiences with my Verizon DSL. I have the expensive shit ($80/month for 1.5Mbits down / 384Kbits up), and maybe that makes a difference. I'm also pretty close to the CO. :P

I get stupidly fast downloads, super good pings (Q3 baby), and it always works. Besides the occasional 2 minute outage, I have no complaints. My setup may be partially to blame for my good experience, so lemme give some tips.

- Have a stable box connected to the modem. I have a Netgear RO318 Security router and it's great. Configure it and it stays just like that. It's doing nothing more than routing and stateful packet inspection, so I don't have to worry about Notepad fucking it up.

- That's it. Have more than one computer so if one fucks up, you can be quick to diagnose the problem. Other than that...

Sometimes my DSL gets a little flaky ping wise. Actually, it's happened exactly twice. It was fixed by resetting the DSL modem, so I'm inclined to think it's either hardware or something silly on their end. But this literally takes 2 minutes so I'm not real troubled by it.

I also have the DSL/Phone filter on the line where it comes into the house - that way I don't need to have it on every phone. This was just a convenience to me - I can plug in a phone anywhere and not worry about having to add a filter.

It probably also helps that I use Linux and MacOS X, where I don't have to worry about Notepad/vim fucking with network settings unless I explicitly tell it to do so. :P