Rendering Plant?
I've been going through phone company hell, too. I have an "FX"
(foreign exchange) line that reaches from my rural area into
Milwaukee, which gives me a local call to the CIS nodes in Milwaukee.
It costs about $130 a month, but it's cheaper than long distance. I
wasn't able to get a reliable 28.8 connection on it, not even a
steady 16.8 connection, but it would hold at 14.4.
A few calls to the phone company revealed they could easily come up
with a measurement in decibels that was "a little off", although the
repair person knew how to measure this, they couldn't tell me exactly
what it was – I'm sure it was some kind of attenuation. So they
tweaked it in the "hot" direction that would supposedly help a data
connection, and that made it worse. Then they moved it the other way
(adding or removing filters, I think), and that was just as bad. So I
had them put it back where it was.
Then I found out there was a no-charge upgrade to "voice and data" quality
lines (as opposed to "voice only"). This only cost the $30 for an on-site
end-to-end frequency analyzer test that would prove the line had enough
bandwidth. Just asking for this upgrade also eans they'd put higher-quality
"cards" in the phone company offices for this line. All this happens on
Friday… I'm very anxious to see how it turns out.