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What a nightmare! Be prepared to wait!Oct 10 '00 Write an essay on this topic.Okay, I sit here awaiting the local telephone company to do whatever it is that they need to do to connect me to their ADSL service. This started about three weeks ago. Actually, I did my initial inquiry last summer, but wasn't ready to commit to a two year contract to get the modem free, and didn't have the three hundred dollars to invest in a modem that I couldn't find on a store shelf anyway! Service with my ISP has slowed down to a slow crawl during peak periods. Actually, it feels like driving down the freeway during rush hour. Stop - Start - Stop - Start. I get parked for a couple of minutes at a time sometimes. I think that the industry is doing what they can to make us have to go to DSL or the equivalent, just to be able to surf the net. At least in the larger cities, that is! Okay, we give up! We're now going from a ISP payment of $15.60 a month unlimited access to a $49.99 (plus tax I'm sure) payment. The ISP access is $19.99, so that's all we're paying now, until the ADSL is connected that is. We dumped the movie and sport channels on our satellite dish so we could afford this. This is added to our phone bill, so I'm expecting a bill of about $80. next month. That's without any long distance added to it. We call and tell our local phone company - Alltel (out of Georgia) that we want service. They take the required information, and tell us that they'll send us the modem, and that a contract will be mailed to us to sign so we won't get billed for the modem. They give me some phone numbers and access information so I can start using the ISP aspect of their service right away. They tell me that I should be up and running on Oct 3, 2000. About Sept 29, I haven't received the modem, and decide to check on it. So I call the number for customer service, and they tell me that the modems are backordered. That they are sorry and that they'll get one out to me as soon as possible. I ask some questions, just to make sure that I have all of my ducks in a row, all of my "i"s dotted and my "t"s crossed. They assure me that I've done everything that I need to do. Well, Oct 3 comes and still no modem. I again call the customer service number and ask them about the modem. At this point I wanted to make sure that I'd done everything I needed to do to get the service started. I still haven't received the contract that I needed to sign and fax back to them. At this point they assure me that they'll get the modem out to me asap - they even told me that they'd overnight it. I called my son, who works for Microcenter (a computer store in Houston) to tell him that the modem was going to be sent overnight, and that he needed to get the firewall program asap! Well, he brought home the program, and we waited. No modem the next day. I had called after noon our time (Central) and since Alltel's offices are in Georgia, I figured that they hadn't sent it yet because of how close to the end of the day it was for them. No problem, I figured that it would come the next day (Friday)Oct 6, 2000. You got it, no modem that day either. I stayed home all day waiting for it. UPS was supposed to deliver it and it was supposed to require a signature. Saturday comes and goes. But, I finally got the contract in the mail. I can sign it and fax it back. One more step in the right direction. Wrong! There's no fax number. I can fill it out, but unless I want to chance it getting lost in the US Postal Service, I'm not sending it. I need to go pay my telephone bill anyway, I'll take it with me on Monday. I go to the local office of Alltel, and while waiting in line, I see a gentleman playing with the computer that is their demo for their ISP/ADSL service. A lady walks out from the back carrying a box with her. It is an ADSL modem. Great! They have some here, maybe?! While she is doing some paperwork for him, I ask him how long he's been waiting for his modem. He tells me that he called on Friday and set it up. Well, I'd like to know who he talked to. All I got were telephone numbers to people in Georgia for my trouble. He left, and I went about paying my bill. While she was taking care of my payment, I asked her if they had anymore modems, and told her about the hassles I'd had with the main office. She said she'd look and she found one. I took it home a happy camper. Between my husband, and electronics technician, and my son, a software salesman that has taken numerous classes where he works, the modem was installed. However, it wouldn't connect. We called tech support, and they said they'd have parts call us. Well, it seems that the problem was in fact that the service itself wasn't turned on yet. I ask when could that be done. They have set the turn on for Oct 16, 2000. At this point, I wasn't a happy camper. I didn't have a choice in the ADSL provider, and only had three choices for an ISP to go with it. You see, in Texas at least, Alltel has a service area, and Southwestern Bell has a service area, and never the two shall meet! So much for competition! Ha! What a crock! I couldn't even keep the ISP I had been with for the last three years. It was an Alltel/SWBell thing. I wasn't on SWBell lines, and WT.net wasn't on Alltel's list of ISP's their equipment would work with. Needless to say, this whole thing is really ticking me off! The service better be D#$M fast to have had to put up with this nonsense, and change a lot of things connected to my three year old email address! You would think that they'd be nicer to customers paying them $50/month than they are to those only paying $20/month. Expect to wait for that fastlane service. Unless you're a big shot with lots of money!  |
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