When they've diagnosed things over the phone, e.g. a few weeks ago, there's never a problem on their end, nobody in the neighborhood reports problems, signal levels seem fine to them, etc.

One time they came out and said something was introducing a bunch of noise and I swapped out a passive splitter and that seemed to help. (I can't figure out why a passive splitter would add noise (it should just attenuate), but there you are.)

I really can't spare the time from work to sit around waiting for them to visit during the week, either. :-(

There was a time when I was still in an apartment that my phone would always go dead when it rained. It took about 3 visits for them to finally fix the problem on the pole. :-/

I'll see what I can do outside this weekend. If it's still problematic, then I'll have to bite the bullet and have them visit.

I would like to think that optical fiber wouldn't have these weather/degradation issues, but I know that there are always special connections that can degrade with time (as ozone attacks the plastic, etc.) and there are various optical repeaters along the path, also too. There's no guarantee that it's any more reliable in the real world even though it should be...

Wish me luck!!

Cheers,
Scott.