I would not wish this experience on anyone.
* * * * * * *
For the past two days I have experienced a severe outage of the internet thanks to Earthlink. Right now my service is very spotty, and repeated calls to their so-called customer support have failed to resolve the problem. Since as I write this I am temporarily on line, I would like to take this opportunity to warn everyone on my contact list about this company, as that I may not have this opportunity until Wednesday of next week when my new ISP has been commissioned.
What has happened is that my connection went down again for 48 hours, for the third time in the last six months. When I have called tech support, after a 30 minute wait I am talking to someone in India, and 75% of the time I can't understand the person I'm talking to and that person can't understand me. If on those occasions when some semblance of communication does become possible, that tech support agent will insist that I go behind my computer, disconnect wires and report to him what I observe, then re-connect those wires, report again....in other words, their first line of defense, when they decide to drop the connection, is to insist that the problem is at your end and that you must ensure that your connections are good. They absolutely positively refuse to consider the possibility that the outage is at their end until you go through these monkey motions of disconnecting cables to risk introducing a failure at your end so that they can blame you for it and refuse to take responsibility for the problem. Please hold this thought, we'll come to back to it.
Once you're past that, then the tech support agent *MIGHT* offer to check the problem at his end. You'll be put on hold, and then they'll acknowledge that there is a problem, and that it will be fixed in 24 hours.
When you try again in 24 hours, guess what, you're still not on the net. This means that you have to call again, rinse and repeat, and then you have to go thru more monkey motions with opening and closing browsers, typing in special addresses to verify that yes indeed, you're not connected. What this means is that you have to wait another 24 hours. This is usual operating procedure, however, with this week's issues that I'm having with them, they actually got innovative and figured out a new way to irritate their customers.
With this week's issues, they admitted the problem was at their end. Two nights ago, their story was that this was affecting several regions in the southwest, and that this would be fixed within one hour. One hour later, the story was changed again, and that this would be fixed within 24 hours.
Last night it took four attempts, yes four, to get hold of someone. The first three, after a 30 minute wait, the phone rang to a tech support agent, and I was immediately disconnected. That meant having to call again, and to go back to my place at the end of the line. Persistence in some cases does pay off, though I had to waste two hours of my life so that I could talk to someone that I could not understand.
When I got thru, the story changed again, and that "all of Earthlink" was affected. Curiously enough, when I accessed their webpage at work this morning, they listed some select area codes that were affected by their server outage, but mine (520) wasn't one of them. Their webpage said that all issues had been resolved and they were up and running again.
When I got home, guess what, still no service. So I had to call again. Things had improved somewhat as that instead of being immediately disconnected three times, they only disconnected me two times. When I got hold of someone, he insisted that they had fixed the problem. I then wanted to know why my fourth modem light wasn't turning on. They put me on hold, asked me to try connecting again, and this time I was able to connect. I'm guessing that when they fixed the server (that is, if that was what was really wrong in the first place) they had to be reminded to turn it on, or something like that.
Earlier this evening, Earthlink went down again. When I tried calling the tech support number, they changed the canned message to admit that there was a widespread outage, and that due to high call volume, they could not take the call.
Anticipating the need to change ISPs, I had a conversation with CenturyLInk, and I have made the decision (after talking to some co-workers) to go over to them. The switchover may not be complete until Wednesday of next week, but the way things are going right now, it will be a quicker fix than what Earthlink is willing to do. Until then, I will *NOT* be quick in answering emails. I will only be able to answer them when I'm able to take my laptop to a Starbucks or somewhere similar.
Now let's get back to that thought about their tech support wanting you to play computer engineer.
I went to the Consumer Affairs (I hope I got this name right) website to read Earthlink reviews. I learned that Earthlink has a 92% highly unfavorable rating from this website. There were also 237 horror stories posted about their tech support.
Many of them said the same thing that I told you, but there were also instances of where one tech support agent asked a customer to go climb onto his roof to verify the connection to his satellite dish! There were several other bizarre stories of a similar nature, but what was really disturbing was a common theme when people terminated their service: Earthlink continued to bill their credit cards and/or took money out of checking accounts, for six months after being notified by these customers that they were cancelling their service!
So....not only am I going to have to terminate Earthlink, I'm going to have to call one of my banks to get an existing credit card that I have cancelled, and to get a new one assigned.....good thing I have more than one Visa card! I have to do this as a preventive measure in order to keep Earthlink from stealing money that they are not entitled to. (McAfee will do the same thing; though in my case when they tried to do that they found that I had cancelled that credit card because I switched over to another card).
What we have here is a company that was once reputable, that has been run into the ground by a management that is either incompetent, dishonest, unmotivated......I don't know which word to use here.
What I do know is that there are too many people in that company who are getting their paychecks irrespective of whether or not they do their jobs in the first place.
Me, I'm done with them. Period.
As for my purpose in sending you this......I'm not calling for a boycott or anything like that. I'm not going to ask you to forward this.
What I am going to ask you is that if you are considering using Earhtlink as an ISP, is to rethink your consideration of them. You don't have to take my word for this. Just google "Earthlink reviews" and decide for yourself what you need to do, if anything.
best regards,
Dave
No comments:
Post a Comment