I’ve never been a big fan of phone companies. I’ve dealt with a small independent local company, lived in SBC territory in several states, and now live in Sprint Local area. I’ve never had good service, ever. The only thing worse than my phone company service has been cable company service.

Here’s my latest saga.

Sprint finally decided to offer DSL in our area. Great, I thought. We had been using fixed wireless for a couple of years since it was the only thing better than dialup available out in the country. But it has a huge problem: it require line-of-sight to the remote antenna. We have some very big trees here. Despite the company saying that the most powerful antenna should penetrate them, and mounting it on top of our roof — giving it a good 40 feet off the ground — we couldn’t clear the trees. So in summer, our connection would be very unreliable, and slow when it did work.

So we signed up for DSL the very day it became available here. Sprint scheduled someone to come out to install a DSL splitter the next week.

Our DSL modem arrived by UPS the day before the installer showed up. But the first problem: I ordered a static IP but there was nothing telling me what my IP is. Sprint DSL tech support (the one bright light in all of this — almost all of those people have a clue, and are helpful and can actually fix problems!) gave me the info I needed.

The next day, Sprint’s installer showed up at about 3:30, and said she had to leave very soon to get the brakes on her truck worked on. Great.
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