[ale] Recommendations/Caveats re: acquiring DSL service

[James P. Kinney III]

Hmm. Sounds like the wailing and gnashing of teeth of _another_
dissatisfied customer.

FWIW, I have had Bellsouth ADSL, Earthlinks ADSL, and Earthlink SDSL.

As I was residential customer #4 in Georgia for Bellsouth ADSL, I did a
lot of debugging of their crap for the first 6 months or so. I got to
know 2 of their engineers on a first name, hows the kids and wife basis.
They ran Linux at home so they would actually talk to me. They have both
since left for greener pastures. Reliability: 99.5% averaged over the
2.5 years.

SDSL with Earthlink. It was expensive ($139/mo). It never went down. Not
one single time. Only glitch was making a phone call to get an MX record
added. Tech support was fast, knowledgeable and had it done in 5
minutes. Reliability: 100% over the 1.5 years.

ADSL with Earthlink. Due to budget problems, I had to downgrade and get
the SOHO ADSL package ( 1 static IP, $65/mo). The switchover from SDSL
to ADSL happened earlier than was expected. Bellsouth pulled my ADSL
plug out as soon as they got wind I was switching the ADSL to Earthlink.
It then took Bellsouth 2 days to figure out I had no connectivity
because I was no longer a customer. It was still 2 days before Earthlink
had said the change would occur. The tech support at Earthlink was
incredible. They didn't bat an eye when I told them I was running Linux.
They asked what my symptoms were and understood what I told them. (No
freakin' Line RX light!). They got an engineer at the switch on another
line and relayed the conversation to me as they debugged that my ADSL
connection was using an older protocol and Earthlink had to reconfigure
how they interacted with me. It took less than 10 minutes and I was
done. 

If Earthlink offered phone service, I would sign up immediately. Of
course it may have something to do with my customer number being below
6100, as well.

On Sun, 2002-03-10 at 22:08, Jeff Hubbs wrote:
> God have mercy on your wretched soul if DirectTV goes out on you. 
>  You'll receive no help.  Your screams will be ignored.  You will call 
> and call, remaining on the phone for an hour or more each time, and you 
> will receive first level tech support and no matter how hopeless your 
> situation is, and no matter how clear it is that someone needs to get 
> into a freaking truck and figure out what died, you will be forced to 
> answer mindless questions about your DSL modem lights.  Every. 
>  Freaking.  Time.  There will be no truck, for such a truck would say 
> "Bellsouth Fast Access DSL" on the side.  The people who manage the 
> people who dispatch and drive those trucks do not want your DirectTV DSL 
> service to work again.  Ever.  
> 
> And they will eventually forget you existed, happily billing your 
> account just the same.  Finally, you will call to cancel your account 
> and demand a refund, and they will act all shocked and hurt that you're 
> leaving them (only then, you observe, do they even express even a 
> molecule of concern).  They will ask why, and you'll tell them, yet 
> still they will not really care.  
> 
> While you await the total loss of service that will eventually come, 
> they will do things like change DNS addresses and mail server names, and 
> they will not tell you these things, for they have decided you do not 
> need to know.  You will try to upload content to your personal Web site 
> and it will not work, and when you call and wait an eternity to actually 
> talk to a zero-morale first-level tech, you will have to explain your 
> problem to them in great detail, for they will know less about it than 
> you do.  And they will just tell you that it will be corrected someday, 
> whatever it is - they have no idea where the server is, who runs it, or 
> anything about it.  
> 
> And you will decide, yes, I have descended into DSL hell.
> 
> And you will learn that cable modem hell is little better.
> 
> And you will pray for a deliverance that may not come for years.  
> 
> - Jeff
> 
> Ken Kennedy wrote:
> 
> >On Sun, Mar 10, 2002 at 07:24:28PM -0500, Jim Seymour wrote:
> >
> >>Courtney Thomas wrote:
> >>
> >>>I'm in Atlanta and would appreciate any/all responses to the
> >>>prospect of getting new DSL service at home.
> >>>
> >
> >I've used DirectTVDSL (formerly known as Telocity) for about a year
> >and a half. No complaints. Recommended. 
> >
> 
> 
-- 
James P. Kinney III   \Changing the mobile computing world/
President and COO      \          one Linux user         /
Local Net Solutions,LLC \           at a time.          /
770-493-8244             \.___________________________./

GPG ID: 829C6CA7 James P. Kinney III (M.S. Physics)
<jkinney at localnetsolutions.com>
Fingerprint = 3C9E 6366 54FC A3FE BA4D 0659 6190 ADC3 829C 6CA7 



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