Shooting at Wamp Rats

We might, after two weeks of frustration, have a fully functional battle station internet connection.

Teresa Aiekle, a local plant representative for Century Link, spent a good portion of her afternoon tinkering with things outside our house Wednesday afternoon and fixed a few things that might have been making our connection go crazy. Here’s what my wife reports:

We have a new “port” on our house, which I suspect is smaller than a wamp rat has something to do with connecting the phone line to the house.

We have a new, fancy DSL filter on the line connecting the modem to the world, so that’s fun.

Teresa also disconnected a random phone line that went from the junction box in the back of the house to who knows where on our property, which is where some of the DSL signal might have been going but maybe it was a neighbor’s phone line or something or a poorly-conceived attempt by someone in the neighborhood to steal cable.

All I know is as of now the crackle that was in our phone line is gone, and, hopefully, the Internet will be fully functional tonight. I plan to conduct some stress testing by finally logging in to my Origin account to play more than ten minutes’ worth of Sim City before the connection drops, which is what has been happening over the past few weeks. Unless, of course, this happens. I am dealing with EA, after all.


UPDATE: It appears if I hard-wire a connection, the internet stabilizes. Wi-Fi connection is still bad. Can't be our Wi-Fi cards, because they all worked fine up until a few weeks ago. To have three fail almost simultaneously and in the same way seems too much of a coincidence.