After a few bumps in the road:
I’m knocking on wood that writing this won’t jinx things — it’s been almost a year without any significant glitches.
Just prior to that time, I was having reasonably reliable service, but happened upon a startling revelation. While helping a friend with a cablemodem problem, I thought to myself that their connection sure was a lot snappier than mine. When I got home and acted on my hunch, I found my throughput only a third of what it was supposed to be — 420kb/sec rather than 1.5Mb/sec.
I made contact again with a former BS tech who had previously helped me with a hardware issue. He gave me the scoop on how to get BS to act when your connection is only operating at the “guaranteed” speed rather than the “advertised” speed. You see, DSL speeds vary with your distance from the central office — the further you are, the slower it gets. But, at 12,000 feet it’s not supposed to anywhere near as low as mine was.
Anyway, I was able to get them to come out, and check it over from end to end. The final result — the drop from the pole to my house was changed and my speed increased to 600kb/sec.
I called the former tech back with the bad news. His advice was to try to get another modem — maybe mine was just bad. So, on a whim, I hooked up an old modem I had had a problem with before which was replaced by BS themselves, and bam(!), I was up to blazing full speed. Talk about ironic.