Eric’s post about his trouble getting Internet service from DirecTV (see below) seems to confirm what I have long suspected. There is no easy way to get Internet service.
Want more proof? My fellow blogger Victor suffered torture at the hands of Verizon when he signed up for Fios in late 2006.
Okay. You could dismiss both these tales of woe by pointing out that both Victor and Eric were signing up for brand new technologies so they should have expected problems.
True enough. Companies often debug their services on folks who are foolish enough to sign up first.
But that doesn’t explain the problem I had getting regular old DSL to work at my apartment earlier this year.
In theory, the process should have worked thus:
1. Sign up for service online
2. Receive modem and set-up CD in the mail three days later.
3. Plug modem into wall and activate service.
Total elapsed time: three days of waiting and less than 15 minutes of active work.
In reality, I signed up for the service but never received anything in the mail. My wife called AT&T and the tech support woman assured her that we could just plug the computer into the phone jack without using a modem.
I assured my wife that the woman was in error about us not needing a modem, so she called again and got the same story.
I called AT&T the third time and — when the woman told me about the no-modem solution — demanded a manager, who conceded the need for a modem and arranged to have one shipped.
When it arrived a few days latter, I pulled it out of the box, followed the set-up instructions and got nothing for my troubles except an error message.
I called customer support, spent 10 minutes on hold and then got a technician who talked me through the same installation process I’d just done on my own. We got the same error message.
The technician asked me to reboot my computer and reboot my modem (which I’d already done on my own) and talked me through the installation process once again. Error message.
The first technician transferred me to another technician who proceeded to do some remote diagnostics on my line. This technician assured me that everything was fine. I begged to differ.
AT&T sent a third technician to my house a few days later to check whether they’d sent me a faulty modem (they hadn’t) and to check whether there was anything wrong with the DSL connection that entered my apartment building (there wasn’t).
The problem, the technician told me, was with the building’s wiring. Either the building management needed to flip some sort of switch or it needed to fix a broken wire in my wall.
I went to the management office and reported this conversation. The woman behind the desk, who clearly had no idea what DSL was, said there was no need to flip any switch to enable DSL and that there were no problems with any of the wires in the building.
It took me three more calls to resolve this impasse and get an AT&T technician and the building technician in my apartment at the same time. Once there, however, the fixed the problem almost immediately and I finally had my Internet connection.
Total elapsed time: more than a month of waiting and several hours of very frustrating effort.
Years taken off my life: at least four.
Grey hairs created: several hundred.
As I was going through this experience, I spent a lot of time cursing AT&T, but given how many horror stories I have heard about Internet hookups, I’m not sure now that my anger was entirely justified.
Apparently it’s often pretty tricky to get a stream of ones and zeros running through wires in the way you want them to.
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