I am a recovering Network Engineer

There. I've said it. That's the first of Twelve steps in admitting you have a problem.

Seems that after 7 weeks of Verizon not having reliable DSL service, I owe them

An Apology of sorts

See? for the PAST 10 days, I have had a strange problem.

I have a RELIABLE connection to their service, as witnessed by a connection that is finally staying up for more then 9 minutes before disconnecting. As a matter of fact
my current connection shows it has been up for 05:33:04 hours now. And before troubleshooting, it showed 2 days 18 hours.

FOR Those of you with Comcast Cable service, you can EAT your hearts out. At one point I was up for 47 days on a SINGLE connection! Rather then go into it here, Comcast users with an internal network KNOW that COMCAST clears (resets) the Cablemodem Every 28 days or so, and thus requires the user to reboot their cable modem, router, and reboot every computer on their network

Anyway, I interrupted myself. I was saying that:

My connection has now been reliable However, I could NOT surf the web.
Symptoms:

Can Not PING to any sites outside of network
Can not traceroute (tracert- shows you the actual PATH that the packet took to your PC!)
Web sites took about a minute to resolve, therefore making system unusable.

And so, after 10 Days of the problem hanging around the Central Office Engineering department, I called the Verizon executive complaint center. Very effective.
After informing me I needed to first try a management escalation (did that 6 weeks ago...)
They said I'd get a callback from someone who would work with me exclusively until the problem was resolved. AND IT WAS.

And if I was UNETHICAL, this would be the end of the post. However, I live (and DIE...)by the ethical decision in life.

I am so ethical, that once when on vacation in a busy town, I was in the game room, where all the coin-operated (can you say DDR Machines?) were located. The man who EMPTIED the machines had just emptied EVERY machine in the room, and put the quarters into a bag, which I noted he wrapped in a plain old towel. Being (as this minipost is about ...ETHICS), when I noticed he left the towel on the floor and was walking out of the room after draining the last pinball machine of money, I grabbed the towel (and HEAVY HEAVY HEAVY) bag of quarters, and proceeded to run.. [Just kidding...I ran after the service guy, and gave him his coin filled towel back].

So Honest Mark says:
It was a CUSTOMER caused problem, albeit a very esoteric one. Why?

The WESTELL 6100 series DSL modem is stupid.

One end is an interface to a 10mb (max) DSL Line
One end is an interface to a ETHERNET port (usually either 10 or 100 MB (Mbper second)

Imagine a common household funnel...One end is wide (100MB/s) one side is 10MB/s...
One would imagine that the engineers writing the software (firmware) of the Westell 6100 modem would understand that because of the size differences of the potential interfaces, they needed to do something to alleviate it. But NO. They chose to (seemingly) take the smart way out, which was actually a STUPID solution.

Since I have an exclusive 100 Megabit per second ethernet lan.. (a Starlan remberance will go here in the future...) ALL my hubs, computers, and internal "stuff" is set for 100MB, rather the 10MB communications.

And my 100MB porn files download (ok, actually just SAVE) TEN times faster using a 100MB network to save them on.

So, when my 100MB DUMB HUB

(technical term, a "smart hub" (also invented by AT&T/starLAN) can do statistical monitoring, and adjust ports, and other neat stuff

"SPOKE" to the Westell Modem, the westell said FINE, lets chat at high speed (100MB/s), instead of at l0MB/s.

BUT the Stupid Westell Modem is REALLY STUPID..... How stupid is SHE??[I mean IT of course]
Warning... Male Reference coming.....

THE WESTELL modem is like that girl who is HOT, but rather slow "up top", and can't understand why the boys all like to give her backrubs, and exercise "inside" her

At any rate, when the person assisting me explained that he once heard of a problem with a cable modem, and a 100MB hub, the light went off in my head. I took an old 10 mb hub, and BINGO, everything is again ok.