(We're on 1.5 megabit DSL, about 10 miles out in the country.)
There was a lightning strike at about 5pm on Saturday. Boom, Internet goes down.
Well, not completely down, exactly. I can ping some sites, I can do fresh DNS lookups of places I don't normally visit... and Skype text chat works. But nothing else works, can't open any webpages, music streams won't play, can't connect to Minecraft servers.
(The analog phone line at our house still worked, so we had that, at least.)
We had the same problem about two months ago after a bad thunderstorm. After that was fixed after the last storm, a phone tech called and said there were some T-spans out.
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(What's a "T-Span"? Well they're spanned T-1 lines. What's a T-1 line? Um, well... here's my quick summary of how rural DSL over copper wire works, without fiber..)
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(Since analog telephones use the T-1's too, why would a lightning strike only take out the DSL? I don't know about this part, but likely because voice telephone service is considered higher priority, so the hardware keeps that working at all costs if some T-1's go down, and the DSL bandwidth is sacrificed so that the phones can still work.)
Our remote telco box is about 10 miles from the Gilman central office. So let's assume there are ten T-1's installed (15.36 megabit if combined, and probably more are used).. that's about 10 repeaters per T-1, and 100 repeaters for ten lines. So, there's a whole lot of repeaters out there, to potentially get struck by lightning...
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Armed with this bit of info about the backend, plus the fact that it's doing the same exact thing again with the trickle of Internet capacity, I called CenturyLink's standard "Internet Repair" support line after the lightning strike, asking if they could check if any "T-spans" are out again.
This was generally met with a CenturyLink Internet Repair response of "I have no idea what that is, but I'll try to forward you along to someone else who may be able to help"..
After going through three layers of skeptical tech people, and the automated system ("Checking the system.. no problems were detected!") the terse reply back is "Everything looks fine from our end, your modem is syncing correctly. We can send out a new modem, it should arrive Wednesday or so."
At first I declined the modem, but decided to have them send one, which is not due to arrive until Wednesday or so. I have a spare non-CenturyLink "TP-Link" DSL modem, and as expected when I swapped it in (Asus router, modems in bridged mode), it performed no differently than CenturyLink's modem.
Meanwhile I found out the house across the road also has their DSL out, and I called around to some neighbors, and found someone else who called CenturyLink about it..
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Finally on Sunday afternoon, as a last resort I called one of the local CenturyLink technicians whose number I happen to have, and left a message asking if they could do anything to check if the T-spans are down for us on Monday, so this outage doesn't have to drag on and on for days yet.
Well what do you know, I get home from work this evening on Monday, and lookit that, the Internet is working again, webpages load, and Speedtest.net says we got 1.5 meg down!
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And this is even before the replacement DSL modem arrives in the mail, still using the non-CenturyLink TP-Link DSL modem!
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Odd how it can be "not working", then suddenly "be working" when the remote CenturyLink customer support in LaCrosse, WI or wherever they are, was claiming all along that their network infrastructure was all fine, from what they could see remotely from their end, 30 minutes after the lightning strike occurred Saturday night.
I don't think Internet Repair support was actively trying to lie to me about this, when they say everything looks fine from their end.
It's just most likely that some local telco equipment has no remote testing or remote error detection capability, and the only way some problems can actually get discovered and fixed is if someone drives around with a truck testing things.
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The sending of a new modem seems more like a stalling tactic on CenturyLink's part, since as they said to me 20 minutes after the strike "You're the only one who's contacted us about this."
And what billion-dollar multi-state company wants to send a technician and truck out, just because a single customer is suddenly complaining? It's much easier to send us a modem and bill us for it, and let the real problems on the back end percolate a few more days, until more people have called in about it.
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CenturyLink remote pedestal: RUBY, 10 miles west of Gilman, WI
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r20533172-Rural-Century-Telephone-remote-terminal-unit
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r20530745-Name-of-this-polemount-outdoor-telco-canister
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