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LBDSL
Lightning Bolt
VIP
join:2002-01-07
Auburn Hills, MI
| reply to Robert Darlington
Re: Lots of great talk....
Robert,
I'll be giving you a call tomorrow, as your concerns are news to me. For being a customer as long as you have been, I'm very concerned about your comments, and would like to discuss them with you.
Brent
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Lightning Bolt Technologies | |
Robert Darlington
@nerdhouse.org
| I've had a great experience over the past 18 months or more with LBTech. I'd guess around 97% positive. The problem is the other 3%. I'm a professional UNIX and network administrator, networking is cake, fundamentals of atm switching are for kids, etc. Power user in other words.
I recently moved across town and convinced my roommate to switch his DSL over to LBTech, primarily because he had a 640/256 with a 2GB/mo cap! Blasphemy!
I talked with Brent, was convinced (again) that he was the man for the job, and we bumped up our speed to 3008/384 with no cap.
We were told that except in very unusual situations (2 or 3 times out of over 1000 switches) we'd have about 30 minutes of downtime. Great CYA talk, because it was a good 24-30 hours of downtime. Covad screwed up, not LBTech, and they were very very fast to point out "it's not us, there is nothing we will do" and "it's usually only 30 minutes" and "the FCC says the telco has 24 hours to respond to the request". I guess they didn't believe me when I said my connection was fine between the wall jack and the DSL modem. I trained up earlier in the day (with the previous ISP) but not LBTech. Nevermind my more than a decade experience in wiring closets. They said they'd have a field tech out between 8AM and noon the next day. 10:30ish rolls around, no word from a tech, however Covad called and said it was a problem on their end. Great. Just as it was the first time I signed on with LBTech over a year before, however that took 2 weeks to resolve and the field tech was just as useless that time  (Covad did some work on a local POP that resolved the problem, and it was nobody's problem at the time by MINE).
On one hand, when things are working, they're great On the other, when they're not, you're dealing with a very defensive (almost to a point of being combative) company. At least if you deal with Covad directly you have somebody in India kissing your ass (their tech support).
After a day or two of using a flawless DSL connection all the sudden we had to roll back to safe mode, a 30% reduction in the inbound connection. Again, not LBTech's fault, just very annoying when you're told you're good to go for a 3 megabit connection and it works great for two days.
Things looked okay in safe mode so I sent in an e-mail to bump it back up to rule out a transient problem with my line. Sure enough a few hours later I was back off the net (dsl modem wouldn't stay connected at 3megabit). I called in, walked to one of their techs (not brent -I think he knows my voice by now) and was told they could do absolutely nothing for me unless I had my customer number. Now, please let me know if I'm out of line here or not. I understand security, their responsibility to the customer, etc. I asked them to put me in safe mode (2megabit/384 instead of 3megabit/384 -exactly the same thing we did before). They refused to do anything for me without the customer number. It was in my e-mail! I didn't have it printed out or written down.
I could totally understand them if I was asking them to do something that would impact my connectivity or my wallet. No go. I offered to read them my RADIUS username/password, no good. I offered to give them access to my gmail account to get this information. No go. I had to call a friend to pull this information for me. Just a reminder to the readers that all I wanted was to be put in safe mode. They can clearly see my noise margins, connectivity (or lack of it), my history with this issue, but still refused to do anything with a 7 digit number. I don't think this is any kind of security breach especially when they have my cellphone number, my e-mail address, and I reminded them they could just send me a message after the work was done if they really were concerned about it.
The good points are nobody will ever be able to screw with your line. The bad thing is you won't be able to get anything done without your customer number. Write it down or memorize it.
Basically every problem I have seems to revolve around the contrast between the service levels before signing a contract and after signing a contract. Well, that and all the technical problems seem to be with Covad. At least next time around when I go right to Covad and cut out the middle man I won't feel bad when I yell at tech support. Brent seems like a really cool guy but I just don't feel like I'm being taken care of. | |
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