Good technical support is hard to find these days. It seems to be especially rare in big internet providers. After all, there is not much profit in residential internet connectivity these days. Tech support has moved over seas as a cost cutting measure, and call volumes appear to only be growing. I understand all that. I run internet services in my day job.
And yet… when it gets to the point that someone like me (usually very cheap) actually willing pays a $150 termination fee to a company if you just won’t make me speak to tech support one more time, perhaps we need to take another look at what is considered acceptable service.
Some 4 months ago I had a problem with my DSL service from XO which I have had for years. XO general has been rock solid but for a one week period I was off the internet and they could not figure out why. When service was finally restored there was no crediting of my account because it turns out that there is no guarantee in my contract for how often the service would be available in a given month. 3 weeks out of 4 in a month is apparently acceptable service under my contract. As you may imagine made me start looking at other vendors.
I started looking at Commcast for internet but because of the way I have my house wired I would need to crawl under the house to bring one more coaxial connection from the outside of the house to my central wiring closet. So, I started looking at other DSL providers. I have friends and relatives who have had very good results with high speed DSL from Earthlink. They said that they 6.0Mb/sec DSL connection would be available at my house. My XO connection is only 768/384 Mb/sec and is more expensive. So Earthlink was in theory faster and cheaper than my current connection.
As I have said, I know people who have had good results with Earthlink. But, my experience was not good. Now I know a fair bit about the internet since I am an Executive Vice President of Engineering and Operations for an internet company and have been for over a decade. So when I hook up the DSL connection and it is not working properly I first make sure I have filters on all my phone lines and do whatever troubleshooting I can. I can see that packets are being dropped between my house and the internet. That is a connection problem. Remember, I have a working internet connection with my other DSL connection so I know my houses wiring is working. But before I call tech support I make sure I am connected directly to the DSL modem. OK, nothing more I can do so I call tech support.
After a long time in a queue I finally get someone on the phone.
Me: “My internet connection is dropping packets”.
Earthlink tech rep in India: “What operating system are you using?”
Me: “I am on a Mac, but that is not my problem, my connection is dropping packets”
Earthlink: “Sorry I can’t help you if you are on a Mac I need to transfer you to the Mac support”
This was my first run in with tech support and it should have been a clue. When I finally get someone they can never tell you anything because Earthlink does not actually provision the phone line. That is done by Covad and they run a line to an AT&T data center. I know this because this is the kind of problem I ran into with XO when I was without internet for a week. So you end up being on tech support for an hour and then they can’t do anything but will call you back. Inevitably, in my case, they call me back the next day when I am at work and say “has the problem been resolved”. I can’t tell because I am at work. And since the problem is intermittent in the first place I can’t tell if they have fixed anything or not. They never have any details about what has been done to give me any confidence that something has in fact been fixed.
So this goes on like this for 2 months. I try and use the internet and I do that often because I often work at home and I am a blogger and a podcaster. When it works I often don’t have time to have a one hour pointless conversation with tech support so I just switch back to that other working DSL connection (which is on a separate phone line). Because I am busy weeks go by with me just using the old XO line. I have not at this point gotten a day’s use out of the new connection. When it works it is great and fast, but then it just stops working.
I finally call them and say let’s just cancel the service. So tech support closes my trouble ticket and transfers me to the department that will cancel the account. The woman who answers the phone is kind and sympathetic. “What if we just wave the fee for the next month to see if we can get it to work”. That seems reasonable, so I decide to continue to give them a try.
I continue to find the line to be unusable. Finally after about 3 months I am told by a second level technician that basically my house is too far from the phone company that I was ever going to get a reliable connection at 6.0Mb. This is during a marathon session with Earthlink over 3 hours on a weekend. I try and point out that my house has not moved. What they are telling me is that they set it up wrong. I am so frustrated that I decide again to cancel the account.
Well, they cannot cancel the account because clearly it is working. Their records show that I have been connected for months. As far as I can tell that must mean that they can see the DSL modem. I point out that if they look more closely they will notice that the account has not been used. I also point out that I have been on with tech support quite a lot. They say “well it looks here like that ticket was closed”. Right, it was closed before when I gave up and told them to close the account. “Well, we will have to charge you and early termination fee of $150 dollars since tech support has not said that this account is not viable”. I think this is where I lost it, truly lost it. Tech support had said that they could downgrade the connection to half speed and that since they have not tried that, they might still be able to get it to work. Of course, they did not say that it should never have been setup at 6.0Mb in the first place. I tried to point out that I would not have bought a connection at that speed. To no avail. I did eventually figure out that since tech support did say that the account had been setup wrong, I was able to get credit for the months that it had not worked, but I could not get out of the contract.
So I carry on. They downgrade the speed on the account and I continue to try and use it. I still get intermittent issues where the account does not seem to be dropping packets but the routing appears to be broken. I can get to some sites and not others. No one even in the second level technical support has ever even tried to look at the routing problems when I bring them up. So finally today when I needed to use Skype to interview someone and the Earthlink connection was again not working I called them back. “We will have to charge you $150 for early termination.” By this point I was thinking that they are not charging enough money. I feel like I would pay twice that to never have to spend another 1-3 hours on the phone with tech support. I have cancelled my account.
What’s next? Probably crawling under my house.
