Over the last few weeks we have been discussing our DSL struggles, which started with a technician doing some simple troubleshooting and quickly escalated into our service being disconnected (also see the "DSL Woes" section of Gibbsblog for your comments on this topic).

Last week we got reconnected and AT&T is still trying to figure out how it happened in the first place. What we do know is that, according to the AT&T representatives we spoke to, we are an anomaly, an apparently unique event in the world of AT&T and SBC.

Given our unusual status we find it remarkable that the Executive Escalation Team and the Executive Appeals people couldn't pick up the phone and say to someone, "Bob, reconnect this DSL circuit before these guys drive us crazy."

The connection now appears to be more stable than it has ever been and even VoIP is working pretty well. Oddly enough (or perhaps not odd at all), a supposedly informed AT&T technician contended that VoIP requires 384Kbps. According to our VoIP provider, Vonage, a best-quality call requires 90Kbps, and the company's Bandwidth Saver feature allows you to limit your calls to 60K or 30Kbps (the latter is described as "normal sound quality").

Interestingly enough, the normal sound-quality setting is no good with fax calls, so Vonage advises you to dial *99 before your target number to increase bandwidth for the duration of a fax call. Unfortunately Vonage fails to tell you in its FAQs what bandwidth limiting does to incoming fax calls. Ho-hum.

Gearhead reader David Strom dropped us a note and asked, "Did you consider trying powerline networking to get a temporary Internet connection via your neighbor's cable modem?" David suggested that this might work if we were on the same transformer as the commander and his lady wife. Until David sent us the suggestion we didn't consider that, but have since tried it with the Netgear adapters and find it doesn't work.

Actually we're waiting for review units of Actiontec's MegaPlug 85Mbps Ethernet Adapter and MegaPlug Wireless Network Extender to arrive, which may be more successful. Stay tuned.

Reader Edward Keating wrote in to brag about his success with wireless links: "I've used an older pair of Canopy backhaul units . . . between a pair of dedicated PCs to download a 130MB file in less than 5 minutes."