DSL is much happier now
I finally called the telco about my DSL issues. Monday morning I had a tech on my doorstep. (surprising!) He got rid of the ‘half ringer’ that was on the box outside my house and redid the jack inside just to be sure. Then he ended up replacing the modem as well. Once the new modem was on, I ended up with 12Mb down and 1.1Mb upstream. Since then, the thing has performed pretty well.