For the past 2 months, our high speed internet has been spotty. When it was working, it was fast, but it was constantly going down and kicking us offline. It doesn’t sound like that big of a deal, but when we are in the middle of uploading important files to our servers for work, and we get kicked offline, we corrupt the files on the server and we loose the work we were doing mid-upload. It has made getting work done efficiently nearly impossible not to mention it makes posting Ca2Pr blog posts more difficult as well (less posts lately).

I have made several calls to PRT (Puerto Rico Telephone) informing them of the difficulties we have been having and they have tried to fix our problem from their computer center (in San Juan maybe?) but none of their fixes have worked. Finally, last week, they said they were going to send a technician to our house to check on the problem. I told them all the problems started with the wind storms and it could be our line and they said it was probably faulty wiring in our house.

I bet that line works in Puerto Rico all the time.

It didn’t work today, I informed them that our modem/router is hooked directly into the line the PRT service man installed in our house and that the phone does not run anywhere else and it’s still not working.

I called over the weekend to see what the status was and finally on Monday (after getting disconnected every time I hit 2 for an English speaking operator) our phone line went out completely. I unplugged our router and plugged in a telephone and it had no dial tone. Hmmm. That tells me there is something wrong with the phone line and not our Internet. I called back and was told that they were working on it but that wasn’t a good enough answer for me. I was escalated to a manager that has been trained to say; yes Mr. Rest, I understand and I’m so sorry. He doesn’t care about my problem and he certainly didn’t escalate the service call. I called back on Tuesday after no one showed up on Monday and they said they had a support ticket and someone would be coming over in the next 48 hours. I told them that we have commercial DSL because we run our businesses on it and that it was an emergency. The supervisor promised me someone would be out immediately…in the next 24 to 48 hours to check the lines.

For the past 5 days Summer and I have been working at friends houses, friends offices and Cafes and we still have no DSL at the house and we are still getting the run around every time we call PRT. I have been researching other Internet providers in Puerto Rico, but there aren’t many in our neck of the woods (West side Rincon) so our really only other option is to go with Satalite…which I am hesitant to use because I heard that our Internet will go down every time it gets cloudy.

On a good note, last night, Summer figured out we could mooch off of a neighbors wireless network and get three bars if we sit in the right spot on the porch.

Internet Update 11:51am Friday April 3rd: As I was driving home from Mark’s House this morning (FatAndTan Photography) I saw a little PRT pick up truck heading my way. I basically pulled into the center of the road so he couldn’t pass, asked him if we were on his repair list for today and he said yes…he followed me back to the house. He inspected our line at the pedestal (where all our utilities come in) and there was no tone (good sign, if the problem were the line running from the pedestal to the house we would have had to figure out how to run 250 feet of telephone line under ground to the house) so he went up to the main utility pole at the end of our street. He told me that the line was disconnected and that was most likely the problem. He reconnected it and just like MAGIC, our Internet is back up.

Puerto Rico Telephone is still on my shit list, but in time, all wounds heal. Let’s see if our PRT Internet service gets back to fast and consistent like it used to be.