| AT&T Goes Direct Got a call from my warehouse staff today; they couldn't get any email or internet access. When I called Digizip, just got a lot of busy signals. Finally called AT&T and was told we were shut off due to non-payment. Called the number she gave me and got the scoop from the AT&T guy that it was Digizip's problem.
AT&T is a bunch of a**holes for not being upfront, and now for stealing customers, but the Digizip fiasco shows they're in the same league. We lost six hours of productive work time today thanks to these two jackasses squabbling like little kids before I got our modems up and running. And, we'll never make up the lost sales.
AT&T wants to take us direct. OK, I get 30 days to cancel without penalty. And on day 29, I will cancel. Screw all these losers, we're going with a T-1 and will share it among the other tenants in the building.
Keep it up fellas, before you know it, you'll be regulated again. Makes me wanna vote for Ker- oh, no it doesn't! |
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 Soapm
join:2001-07-15
Aurora, CO | said by ewm0826:
...Screw all these losers, we're going with a T-1 and will share it among the other tenants in the building.
From what I've seen this is also taking a chance. If one tenant goes down they have to take the entire T-1 down to test. If you go down they can only test during the agreed maintenance period because they will take the others down. If one doesn't pay their bill they take the entire T-1 down because contractually you are all connected. I would consider other alternatives and don't forget what a great thing ISDN backup is in times like these... My $00.02 |
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| reply to ewm0826
You are a complete idiot....How could you possible be pissed at AT&T for helping. They were owed $148,000 from a company that agreed to pay (Digizip). It is bullshit but you would do the same. When customers a paying Digizip and Digizip doesn't pay AT&T for 4 months AT&T gets blamed. Look at the bigger picture man. We are customers of Digizip not AT&T. |
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| said by hey422222:
You are a complete idiot....How could you possible be pissed at AT&T for helping. They were owed $148,000 from a company that agreed to pay (Digizip). It is bullshit but you would do the same. When customers a paying Digizip and Digizip doesn't pay AT&T for 4 months AT&T gets blamed. Look at the bigger picture man. We are customers of Digizip not AT&T.
I believe ewm0826 was disgusted with the unethical conduct by both vendors; 1)Digizip not remaining current, failing to bond around their arrears to isolate their customers from fall-out from their dispute with AT&T, 2)AT&T for unethically attempting to take customers away from Digizip, direct to AT&T, in the aftermath of AT&T's decision to shut Digizip down rather than extend terms, or negotiate further with Digizip.
I would not conclude that he is an idiot for desiring to distance himself, and his company, from both these unrecalcitrant scoundrels. |
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bandor
join:2004-03-07
San Jose, CA | Think of it from AT&T's standpoint:
Here are all these people who lost their dsl: their isp is blaming at&t, their isp isn't asnwering the phones. What to do? Follow process and inform all the callers all information is between AT&T and Digizip and that they will need to call Digizip for any information regarding the outage? AT&T's point of view - what can we do for these people? Lets offer to turn their services on (even though we may never get paid for this service by digizip) until they get a new line installed. Yes granted its a new line with AT&T - but hey they aren't in the busisness of losing money.
DigiZip is a reseller plain and simple, they take service from a provider, rebrand it as their own, and sometimes throw in packages such as email, dns, webhosting. AT&T has custom domain email (its expensive), they have dns hosting (its realy expensive), and offer no webhosting.
sooo - You pay digizip for doing almost nothing, who pays AT&T to provide the layer 3 routing/backbone to the internet, who in turn pays covad or some other CLEC to do the actual install/repairs, who in turn pays your local phone co (verizon/qwest/sw bell/sbc-ameritech/at&t) to take care of the actual lines.
Why do people use resellers? So they get 1 bill with all their services combined. Why is that bad? Reseller goes out out busisness, your completely wiped out. Spreading your busisness out if much safer. Resellers tend to be very small companies that while they handle large amount of busisness their profit margins are small (since they do so little actual work), they tend to go under fairly often.
digizip = roughly .003% of revenues for AT&T Busisness IP DSL over the course of a year |
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| said by bandor:
...What to do? Follow process and inform all the callers all information is between AT&T and Digizip and that they will need to call Digizip for any information regarding the outage?...
Bingo! We have a winner.
Any other action by AT&T could be construed as active tortious interference with Digizip's contractual relationship with its' subscribers. AT&T's unethical behavior is compounded by the possibility that AT&T may be in material breach of its' contract with Digizip by having any direct dealing with Digizip's customers. The relative economic power, and the converse respective importance of the issue, between the parties would not reflect well on AT&T if dragged before the bench, and is a sure loser in the court of public opinion.
The balance of your pro-Bell troll is irrelevant to the issue at hand. |
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Soapm
join:2001-07-15
Aurora, CO | said by ross:
said by bandor:
...What to do? Follow process and inform all the callers all information is between AT&T and Digizip and that they will need to call Digizip for any information regarding the outage?...
Bingo! We have a winner.
AT&T's unethical behavior is compounded by the possibility that AT&T may be in material breach of its' contract with Digizip by having any direct dealing with Digizip's customers.
I was wondering when someone would bring this up, AT&T should not had any contact with Digizip customers. Not even to tell them about the non-payment issues and certainly not to offer them service. This is a HUGE NO NO!!! |
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| This is very true, but I can already see at&t denying all of it. |
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| reply to hey422222
I may be an idiot - I never claimed to be Einstein - but I have a business to run, people to pay and AT&T had to know what their action would do. Or is it they didn't care?
They couldn't do that to a phone line; state laws prohibit that type of unilateral shut off action. Unfortunately, laws haven't caught up with technology. I'm sending letters to my local reps to change that. All of you here should too.
But you see, here's where they really stink - whatever the problem was between Digizip and AT&T was resolved and apparently within a few hours, because our DSL was back on the next day. AT&T rep was saying that Digizip was going out of business - that's what they told me. That wasn't true, at least not in the short term and if Digizip had filed Chapter 11, that would have prevented AT&T from turning them off.
AT&T signed us up, under the pretense that "we're going to get you hooked up quickly" as an AT&T customer. I canceled the order today (8/31) and now have Comcast installing a 1.5 Mb static IP in a few days. It'll cost only $60 more than the IDSL we're using. Say what you want about Comcast; their business service is different from their home service. And, in my experience at home with them, the uptime is +99%.
Digizip ain't getting a free pass from me; they need to handle their affairs better and keep their customers in the loop. I'll guarantee they'll lose more customers the way they handled this than if they had been upfront with us. But, as a major supplier, AT&T isn't going to go under by extending a little additional courtesy in a situation like this. Look up UNPROFESSIONAL and UNETHICAL in the dictionary and you'll see this - AT&T!
Anyway, I'm moving on.
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Ed |
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