A sprinkling of early DSL experiences

Mountain View, Calif.

As an early digital subscriber line (DSL) service customer, Turnstone Systems is already enjoying the technology's promised benefits: inexpensive, high-bandwidth access from engineers' homes into the corporate network . . . and integrated phones and sprinkler systems?

Well, the phone/sprinkler system situation was a bit of a surprise, but the telephone company equipment maker says it went into the DSL sign-up process knowing that with such a new network service it would need to take the good with the bad.

On the whole, the benefits of being an early DSL adopter have outweighed the assorted installation snafus experienced to date, says Eric Andrews, Turnstone's vice president of marketing.

He says engineers linked to the corporate network via 384K bit/sec DSL connections work more efficiently than they could over slower dial-up lines. And because the connection requires no dialing or call setup, the engineers are more willing to work nights and weekends from home, he says.

At $125 per month per remote user, DSL service costs more than analog dial-up lines, but Andrews says Turnstone makes up for the additional expense in the extra hours logged by the engineers.

Then again, Andrews does not sugarcoat his DSL experiences. There have been plenty of mixups, he says.

This is the way the installation process is supposed to work: Turnstone calls DSL provider Covad and orders new lines to handle the high-speed dedicated service. Covad contacts Pacific Bell to get the local phone company to set up the lines between the Turnstone engineers' homes and the PacBell switching office.

From there, Covad takes over and connects the lines to Turnstone's corporate headquarters. Then Covad technicians hook up the engineers' PCs to DSL routers and connect the routers to the phone lines.

But the installations didn't always go as planned. In the case of the lawn sprinkler, the PacBell technician who installed the new DSL phone wires also disconnected the wires to the guest room phone and apparently reattached them to the timer for the lawn sprinkler, Andrews says.

The engineer who owned the house noticed the phone was dead and the sprinkler system switched on whenever he lifted the receiver on that phone, Andrews says.

While the sprinkler episode has been the most remarkable foul-up to date, Turnstone says that existing phone service has been disrupted more than one third of the time when a DSL line has been installed. The cause? PacBell sometimes disconnects one end of the existing phone line, either at the customer's home or in the phone company switching office, Andrews says.

Turnstone has also found that about half the time, it takes more than one try to get the DSL line working. In cases in which the line didn't work right away, it has taken an average of four weeks to resolve the problem. It took nine weeks for the problem to be resolved at Andrews' home, he says.

The average time technicians spent at customers' homes was 2.7 hours, and each installation required an average of two visits from PacBell and 1.6 visits from Covad.

"These figures were rather alarming, but we have heard similar statistics from other service providers," Andrews says.

In Andrews' case, the Covad technician checked the router, examined the phone wiring in the house and looked at Andrews' PC, all of which worked.

But the technician still couldn't set up the service, so he drove back to the PacBell switching office to run a tone over the line to see if the circuit worked. It didn't.

That meant getting PacBell to set up the line again, which took weeks.

When Covad tried a second time to set up the service, the line was still dead. Finally, on the third try, after six service calls to his house, Andrews got his DSL line.

That kind of problem arises because two companies are involved in setting up the service, and current technology does not allow for easy testing of circuits from the customer end, he says.

"In an ideal world, DSL installation should be a simple single visit from the service provider. Understand that there are a lot of kinks to be worked out," Andrews says.