It really grinds me when the support techs at SBC Yahoo! read the parts of their scripts where they thank me for "choosing" their DSL service. It's the only one available in my area - and that, just barely.

I live in a residential development, on the edge of a metropolitan area. (Interstate 635 and Northwest Highway-Dallas) Even so, I'm at the last six inches of coverage for DSL - and SBC is the only phone company that's allowed to do this kind of business in my neighborhood.

As a result, the quality of my DSL never reaches the "up to 384k" promised by SBC... but I do get always-on, digital access. A lot of people can't get that much.

Worst Ever Tech Support
The number and variety of ways that the SBC tech support system has disappointed me are many. This is particularly annoying because I don't want to have to be using tech support at all.

For the initial setup, they only took 6 months and two false starts. Although they were marketing DSL in my neighborhood, their equipment needed to be reconfigured before they could actually provide the service. The upside was that each time they failed to setup the service, they left a DSL modem behind. These came in handy as power surges, heat venting and other avoidable problems burned them out.

Static IP's - Don't Ask
The service worked fine for a year, and I decided to upgrade to a level of service that offers a pool of 5 static IP's. Again, they needed to configure, reconfigure and repeatedly bring down my service.

Each time I called tech support, they gave me different reasons why my service didn't work. Several so-called technicians tried to convince me that my ethernet cables were in backwards, or that my router (DLink DI-704P) was bad.

The problem, of course, was that they didn't have me setup correctly. There are routers, switches, DNS servers, authentication servers and all kinds of places where the IP's need to be plugged in and various mappings performed. They simply were not doing this correctly.

You can't go back...
The final problem I've had with them was when I finally gave up on getting Static IP's from SBC. This involved taking me off of one set of servers, and putting me back on their PPPoE (Point-to-Point Protocol over Ethernet) system.

When they had me back on PPoE, I could connect once. If I disconnected, and tried to reconnect it wouldn't work. For several months I had to make a call to tech support - almost always over 30 minutes - and have them "rebuild the router".

Rude Customer Support Techs
The worst part about dealing with tech support wasn't so much the fact that they could not deliver what they promised, nor that they took so long to not deliver it. It was their sheer rudeness.

Almost every support technician made inappropriate remarks, and often outright insults. Granted, they're in a difficult position, but the customer is never supposed to be treated as a verbal punching bag.

Recommended:
No

Amount Paid (US$): 35
Version Number or Year: 2004