The first thing that comes to mind when the Internet goes down is that it stinks. This happened at our house yesterday. The biggest problem was that I couldn’t troll the Internet looking for the answer because I wasn’t connected. This made for some interesting conversations in the house: “Dad, I have to do my homework” and “I’d like to go on the Internet, too.”

In the end, the outage was about 24 hours. Much more than I would have liked, but better than a worst case scenario. The problem was that AT&T neglected to actually provide me with some critical login information. 2 calls to AT&T support resulted in one CSR sending me off to a pay-for service and the next saying that it could take until 11:59pm (sure, but the DSL portion is working .. I just don’t have an IP number). After a call this morning basically using the phrase “it doesn’t work” I found a much more helpful CSR .. OK, they weren’t really that much more helpful, but they did find the right script screen .. Turns out the first two CSRs thought the service was DHCP even though I asked both of them if it were PPPoE. The third CSR from this morning didn’t really seem to know either, but she did say I had to register first. I said, great, but I don’t have Internet so how can I register? Bingo! I said the right thing.

Once I said this, she gave me the default Password to connect to AT&T DSL via PPPoE. Once I had this information I was able to get on the Internet enough to get to the register site. Once registered, I can use my login/password to connect to PPPoE and voila .. Internet is working again. WooHoo!

All of this to make sure the switch to U-Verse goes smoothly in a few weeks (or months). Seems if you have third-party DSL that AT&T won’t switch you over to U-Verse until you switch to AT&T DSL first. Well, step one is now out of the way and I’ll live with it until it’s time to switch again.

Such is life. At least it’s not Comcast