Repeated Outages (Berryville, VA) 540-955 Central Office Issues
rosenclr
Newbie

Verizon cannot keep up their DSL in Berryville, VA (540-955)  I am very close to switching to Comcast, if they dont have their latest outage resolved by noon tomorrow.  I work at home and need consitent connectivity.  Verizon has exprerienced multiple issues over the past month and during the summer (White Board No.s 93688, 94127, 97234, 97529)  These four outages have been in excess of 12 hours each.  Each time I opened a ticket with the call center (866-567-6789) in India and they have very little information to offer other than an estimated resolution time, which is definately estimated.  They dont have any communication with the local teams that are troubleshooting the isue other than looking at the 'white board' which is updated in their database.  This most recent outage (WB 97529) they are telling me that they are trying to isolate the issue on the ASAM?  Not sure what an ASAM is? A______ S_____ Access Multiplexer?    I know about a DSLAM device and how DSL works in detail as I was in telecom in the past, but could not find what an ASAM was on what is.  They told me that 73 customers are out of service, but they had no information on what escalation tier this was at, nor what the RFO's wer from the past whiteboard numbers/outages.  My sense is that they have a bad piece of equipment and are reluctant to replace it.  They cannot tell me what he true issue is whenever I call, whether it is the the Router or Routing, the upstream connection, the Central Office equipment, the ports, the DSLAM, the whatever.  It is very frustrating.  I am getting in the car now to see if a truck is even at my local CO.  I bet there is not, they are probably trying to trouble shoot remotely and they they will dispatch a tech to the CO tomorrow morning.  Would probably not be any better even if I was Business class vs. Residential.  DSL is DSL, it's not like is is a DS-1 and they probably dont really care.  Maybe they will care when I cancel and move to Comcast for more reliable service.  Frustrated in Berryville, VA.  

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Re: Repeated Outages (Berryville, VA) 540-955 Central Office Issues
ohpoleez
Contributor - Level 2

Hi,  the ASAM performs the same function as the DSLAM did but with with the newer technology. It seems that those folks newer to the workings of DSL (6 years or fewer) often use the terms ASAM and DSLAM interchangeably when they are actually two different technologies. The DSLAMs were for use with the old frame relay Fujitsu modems.

Not much help to resolving the repeated outages in your area, but at least it answers one of your questions.

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Re: Repeated Outages (Berryville, VA) 540-955 Central Office Issues
rosenclr
Newbie

Thx for the info on the ASAM, so basically it is like a DSLAM, it aggregates the copper lines (i.e. multiplexes) and the directs them to the upstream bandwidth via a DS-1 or DS-3 (whatever the connection of the backbone) and routes it out to the closest Verizon drain.
You are not going to believe this, after being up most of the day, I am down again.  Called back into the 866.567.6789 call center and this time they said that my line was bad, funny b/c I was up all day and making a call to them on my POTS line.  Then the rep told me that the router was down this time, not the ASAM.
I asked to be escalated to the manager on duty to get some more information and they sent me to {edited for privacy}.  He might be the same manager that called me this morning.  I asked for a Pin to call into the manager on duty hotline (866.945.3809  Pin 55452) and the tier 1 rep would not provide one.  Here we go again.
{edited for privacy}
Seems like this service is very unreliable, especially considering I pay $400 a month to Verizon for my POTS line, Cell and Internet.  I had to go buy an over the air card so I could do some work.

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