Bryan,
Your read on the situation is correct. The Telco is not trying to hide from me or what I once encountered (in Georgia) of "we are giving what the tariff says . . . so shove it".
On the contrary, they are stumped as am I. In our prior location, we had copper for the 3 miles from the CO and a switch (5ESS?) that could be provisioned as "Voice" or "Fax Modem" on individual POTS lines. Indeed, they told me that they could tweak it further, but we made it work with the "Fax Modem" setting. Our modems were indeed "dual" modems, but we use them because they can be forced to "quick connect" at 1200 baud with no handshaking. MultiTech has told us that they can't sell us any better modems than these antiques in our rack. If you go to their website, the exact same modems are featured for our applications.
The Telco claims there is no way they can give us copper, that the fiber runs about 20 miles down the road from the CO to us, via a "RT" about .25 miles away. The conversion there is made, they claim, with some model (2000?, they won't tell me) of Litespan (division of Alcatel/Lucent) DLC.
I have found general documentation, not detailed enough, online that documents the POTS provisioning in the admin software for the Litespan units, but not detailed enough to be able to point to them to say, "insert this tab into this slot".
They have been very helpful and patient. It is just that ours is a real outlier to their normal problems and they don't know how to deal with it, it is certainly not that they won't deal with it.
No one feels threatened by us telling them what to do or how to do their job. They are stumped, we are stumped, but we know our configuration works on other phone lines about 90 miles up I-95. They would love for us, through you, to find a fix so that I will get out of their hair.
I am hoping there is someone here who, given these variables, can tell us what to do, or tell us who can tell us what to do.
All best,
Jay
