This morning I decided to restart the VDSL gateway since I was getting all kinds of errors. This resulted in me having no internet at all.
Before AT&T would send someone out here they made me reset the gateway back to factory defaults resulting in all the custom port mapping and routing that I had setup being wiped out. Naturally this didn't help at all.
This morning the first tech came out and said the problem was on the line so he left and a second tech came out.
About the only thing that hadn't been replaced is the cable that goes from the pole to our house through a ficus tree. The ficus tree was a small braided ficus that came home from the grocery store that has grown so huge that the cable become part of the tree.
Today's AT&T decided that was an issue with this cable and was going to send the tree people out to cut a way through it. Not wanting him to leave I climbed into the tree and cut a path through it so that he could run a new cable from the pole through the tree to the NID.
This seems to have worked as I'm now getting over 17kbps.
Maybe today is the day I actually will have decent internet.