Adventures in setting up a new AT&T DSL subscription

I moved to Los Angeles about two weeks ago, and it took nearly that long to get my AT&T order for DirectTV, DSL, and home phone service hooked up and running. 

To keep things simple, I went to the AT&T website and ordered the lowest cost, all-in-one package of DirectTV, DSL, and home phone service. 

The DirectTV tech arrived a couple days later and had the entire system with DVR in the living room and an antenna on the roof installed in just a hour or so. Quick and efficient.

Getting the home phone and DSL working had some snags.

First, they didn't include the apartment number when they shipped the DSL modem. So the modem arrived a few days later than it should have. I plugged up the modem and couldn't get a signal. So I had to brave the AT&T voicemail tree to get a tech visit scheduled.

A few days later, the DSL tech arrives. He checks the wiring in the house, then has to drive down the street to check the wiring on the pole somewhere. Turns out, the house isn't wired into the system properly. Once he gets that connected, he came back and verified everything was working. Not only that, he walks me through the entire AT&T/Yahoo/SBC account registration and setup. 

I wish I had gotten the tech's name. He was friendly, helpful, and informative. Employees like that are gold. He turned what had been a frustrating, drawn out process into a happy ending with warm fuzzy feelings. 

Part of the delay, I have to admit, is I didn't have a home phone I could plug into the wall jack. I cancelled home phone service years ago due to the high volume of telephone solicitations I was getting. So many, in fact, that it was a chore to delete the voicemails off the answering machine. And this was AFTER getting onto the Federal Do Not Call list and aggressively demanding my rights under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) to the companies calling me. So I killed my landline and had discarded my phone some time ago. If I had a phone on hand, I would have discovered the house wasn't getting dialtone.

So, two weeks of mooching on my neighbors' unsecured wifi and a handful of trips to Starbucks to use their wifi later, I'm legal again. I had gotten used to having my files on a local network, streaming videos and podcasts to my widescreen TV, and just generally living a digital lifestyle that doesn't work so well when you don't have your own spigot on the series of tubes that is the Internets.