AT&T Midwest → Re: chicago/nw indiana speeds down again

BB,

When I accessed the help desk via the net (last night)... and when I talked to a support person on the phone (today)... in both cases they claimed there 'was' and 'has-been' no problems with the system.

Are they in-denial, unaware, or just unwilling to admit there was a problem.

I've been thrilled with SBC and will likely continue to be. However, this kind of thing can change opinions fast.

(BTW, your comments have been very appreciated and go a long way to developing/maintaining customer loyalty.)

Rev

The rep you talked to might not have been aware or might not be able to look up the information based on your account and where they show you out of.

For instance, if ASI had a redback failure, they might not know as fast as ASI would, and vice versa for SBCIS. So say SBCIS loses a backbone route to the internet, ASI won't know this because it is outside ASI's control at the time. So there is a delay there. Also the same reps that answered the phone yesterday might not be working today. For all he knows he could have been fishing yesterday, and came in today, checked his tools and saw nothing.

One thing I have learned on outages is to wait a bit, and check around. Reason being is I had this happen here in the forums of a "outage" took me 2 weeks to pick it apart and the only thing in common was they were all SBC customers. That was the only thing they had in common. Well of the 10 cases I had here is how it broke down

• One gentlemen reported "I replaced a filter and am back online now. "

• One lady stated her son was messing her computer up and she tested it with her work laptop and the internet is working.

• one guy had a modem on the edge of death, and replaced it and he is back in business.

• 3 others from the pacbell forum was for sure their outage in chicago had something to do with their speeds in Sacremento, CA.

• one person did not even have dsl ordered and he supposedly had or was part of the outage

• Another person finally had enough and had a tech come out. Guy had a Alarm installed on the side of his house and that was seizing his line from his dsl.

• One person was a covad customer and claimed he was part of the outage too.

So as you can see really quickly it can be rather frustrating working some outages here. So I have learned the lesson to wait a bit before jumping on the outage bandwagon, cause as you can see looks can be decieving.

Just like RadioDoc stated one day and I quote this from him "You can post and bitch about the problems or assist in fixing them, your choice!!"

It can be frustrating for some of us as well. Especially when problems go on and on and we've done all the standard troubleshooting steps a thousand times, just to be thorough. Especially when some of us have been customers for years and have never had a significant problem until recently.

Last night was a hell of a night for me, as evidenced by the included pingplot. Usually my probs go away by midnight, but this time I was pretty much down until about 45 minutes ago. And I don't think that it's me, because most of the errors that I got started outside of my first couple of hops and then trickled down to me. You can see that by looking at the graph.

Thanks for the info BB.

I certainly hope SBC appreciates your effort.

So many companies focus on price -over- customer service.

I'll take customer service any day....