A NYNEX moment

[serinde]

Verizon tech support just told one of their aDSL customers (who has an account with us, and who called us to ask "can this possibly be true?!") that the reason her connection is slow is because the Ethernet cable from her router to her Mac is longer than 10'.

Ah, NYNEX. You can change your name as much as you like, but your crusty, rat-infested soul will always shine through.

Comments

[rainbear.livejournal.com]

Ok.

Snarfing ramen noodle soup HURTS!

Thanks for the laugh! :-))))

[tactisle.livejournal.com]

Wow, either the Verizon tech droid was as old as me (and thus remembers the days of non-USB printers), or is a musician (and was thinking of MIDI). Either way, mightily confused.

( I must not assume malice when stupidity will serve. I )
..o0( must not assume malice when stupidity will serve. I...)

[arkham1010.livejournal.com]

Nice BS answer, but isnt there a grain of truth to it? IIRC, cat5 suffers from signal degredation after about 1000 feet or so, and thus needs a repeater somewhere to boost the signal. having to repeat all the packets that were degraded could slow things down.

[sweh.livejournal.com]

10 ft is a lot less than 1000 ft.

IIRC the ethernet spec says you need repeaters after a distance (300m, 1000ft) but it also allows up to three repeaters in any network path (so a max a three hubs/switches between two machines on the same subnet) before timing issues can cause a problem.

I was on a training course in 1997 (NT Core Technologies, if you can believe it!) and the instructor tried similar bullshit when one of his ad-hoc labs failed to work (had to do with TCP routing over dialup which could never have worked because the server didn't have a return route!) and claimed it was because the cables were at the max length allowed by spec (of course the workstations themselves could talk to the server directly, it was just when we tried RAS networking... duh!!!). I almost got kicked off that course!

[sweh.livejournal.com]

Or is it 100m, 300ft? I can never remember that ethernet spec :-)

[arkham1010.livejournal.com]

Which is why i said there was a grain of truth, not that the statement was true. :)

[syringavulgaris.livejournal.com]

There's a grain of truth to it, rougly comparable to saying "water in your router will break it, so the reason your router is broken is because the air in the room it's in is at 35% humidity".

[heliumbreath.livejournal.com]

Then again, it could be that they're giving out ADSL routers with a sufficiently lame-arsed imitationimplementation of the Ethernet spec that it really does start to show its crapness on a cable longer than 10'. Think back to TTL pseudo-RS-232 and other exercises in quality-cutting.