Before I begin, I’d like to apologize to all the good service and support personnel that do work at Verizon. I’ve never met you, but I’m sure you’re out there. I went online last night to do some work and noticed that the DSL was down. I checked my router and the line status said DOWN. Good enough, I figured I’d call Verizon to see what was going on. I live in the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton area of Northeastern Pennsylvania. A message stated that service was down from somewhere in Massachusetts to New York City (about 2 1/2 hours away) to Virginia. I wasn’t sure if I was included in the area, so I finally received a service rep. The rep forced me to do everything from unhooking my router to resetting the modem to attempting to connect via the modem. Nothing worked. The last thing we tried was changing the connection settings in the modem from bridge to PPPoE. After 10 seconds I received a message box that said “A timeout occurred while attempting to connect. The connection is down.” The service rep then said that because I received a timeout, my modem must be bad. I kid you not. The connection is down so that automatically means the modem is bad. I asked her if by chance the line is down and she said I’m not in a reported outage area and she could not test to see if the connection is down, but she’d bet that it was a modem issue instead of a line issue. <sigh>