Blogger Sarah has discovered the most painful way possible to cancel her DSL. She’s either crazy or she’s the most patient, good-natured person in the entire world. She writes on her blog:
If you also suffer from this travesty of service, here’s how to get out of your contract:
1) Set-up service visits every week, or every other week if you are taxed for time, for almost 3 months straight.
2) Take notes of what each tech tells you and what he does… and how it doesn’t help.
3) After 3 months, the cost to keep sending techs to you will outweigh the profits of keeping you in contract. (In my case, they finally admitted I am 14,600 feet from the signal center, much too far away to get a proper signal.)
4) Request tech services to make a note of this on your account.
5) Say a prayer, call the disconnect office, list all the dates of tech visits and their subsequent uselessness, mention the note, request to be released from your contract.
6) Thank the person on the other line for helping you to at long last end your DSL nightmare.
Dude, 3 months? You need to escalate. —MEGHANN MARCO
Freedom from the evil that is AT&T! [To See a World In a Grain of Sand] (Thanks, Clayton!)
(Photo: mrbill)
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I’m surprised they didn’t cancel the service themselves after the fourth or fifth call…it probably costs AT&T the equivalent of at least one month of service per call, and six months’ worth of profit margin on that service – after this many calls there’s no way they’re going to make any money from you for years.
@rekoil: Business isn’t thought of in that manner. While net income is an important financial figure, another important figure is revenue. Different departments in the business have different bottom lines they need to meet. So the sales portion of the company doesn’t care how much money the company as a whole is losing off of a customer, they care about getting the revenue from this customer to increase their sales figures so they can meet budget.
The real question is why someone that far from the CO got DSL installed in the first place. The right answer is fiber or cable. Whoever sold the account wasn’t doing a good job of checking.
@mikeyrock: It is ironic that this ends up being the basis of most customer service issue settling (from us, the customer’s, POV) – companies competing within themselves, so to speak, offers us so many opprotunities to take advantage and actually get what was offered us at a fair price (oh gnoes!)… Well, it’s rediculous. (The sad part is that not enough people realize how easy it is to do this – I’m of the opinion that highlighting alternative methods of success like this very post could very well be it’s own blog and succeed as well as the Consumerist does.)
@Buran: Whoever sold the account probably didn’t give much of a damn.
@Buran:
No shit…we’re about 4 miles from the CO and ATT refuses to sell us DSL service. We’ve tried many times because we’d drop Charter in a second if we could. You’d think that a house in the St. Louis suburbs would be able to get DSL, not like we’re out in Bumfuck, Egypt
Oh well, I’d rather have them refuse us in the first place than get DSL and be stuck in the unfortunate situation Sarah found herself in.
“Dude, 3 months? You need to escalate.”
Put THAT on a Consumerist t-shirt.
Oh good lord no. I tried for 3 months to get my DSL up and working with ATT/SBC, and they were trying until I got fed up and canceled. They never did know what was wrong…
I’ve got a better idea, skip DSL and go with broadband (cable)! DSL is really only marginally faster than dial-up in the end. Let the phone companies feel the pinch of offering inferior capabilities.
@rg:
Marginally faster than dial-up? You win the n00b award.
@LatherRinseRepeat: Sprint DSL at the Presidio of Monterey in 2003-2004 WAS only marginally faster than dial-up. (Like 7 kB/sec or so)
It was sad. And people were paying 40 bucks a month for this.
You sure that wasn’t ISDN?
7 kB/sec?? That’s horrible. Sounds like Sprint was selling service without testing the lines.
As much as we all like to bash Verizon, I’ve been very happy with their DSL service. Speeds have been consistent (2.8 ~ 3.0 Mbps), experienced no outages, and I haven’t received any notices about excessive downloading. After reading various stories from the Consumerist and other sites, it seems that cable broadband is the one “offering inferior capabilities”.
But of course, individual experiences may vary.
Technically DSL can work up to 17,000 feet. But anything past about 12,000 you start to really run into line quality/speed issues and alot of problems that could be ignored with a a wire run less than that magnify.
I myself for years was 16,200 feet from the CO with 1.5/385kbps service. When I worked on a local tech desk a good portion of our customers were >15,000 feet. Of course, we’d always tell them that at that distance reliability & speed can’t really be guaranteed.
Slow and steady wins the race.
@mikeyrock: Actually, with some companies it is – a coworker who worked at another large DSL provider told me that his old company would do a maximum of two truck rolls to try to get a customer’s service working, and if it wasn’t up by then they would either bill the customer for subsequent calls or give up on delivering the service and let the customer cancel without penalty. It simply cost them too much to keep sending techs out, given the margins involved.
I went through a similarly horrendous experience with Earthlink back in the day. I was around 14k away and kept getting disconnected (esp during peak hours). I suffered with it for about a month (calling 2-3 times a week) before they finally let me out without a penalty. Nasty business.
I work in the at&t disconnect department. The easiest way to avoid the etf is to tell us you are moving. It has to be somewhere that is serviced by att but doesn’t have dsl. Then say the only reason i have phone service is for dsl but call me when it reaches my area. If the dumb rep doesn’t do it ask for a sup the potential of keeping a customer in the future is better than having someone who will never return.
@yg17: Where are you? I’m in Brentwood and AFAIK you can get DSL at my house (but not naked and I don’t have a land line, so I have Charter). My parents are in U City and I set them up with DSL with no problems (but AT&T/Yahoo webmail is another matter… they have Gmail now).
I’m STILL upset that Charter is refusing to fix CBS HD over cable (I have a Tivo Series 3) despite repeated complaints. At least my cable doesn’t go down often.
At least neither myself or my parents are under a contract!
@rg: Depends on where you are in relation to the CO and the condition of the lines. Sometimes, you are correct. Sometimes, DSL actually is quite a bit faster. Sometimes, cable service is.
@Buran:
Chesterfield. It’s rediculous. Everyone out here is rich too, so it’s not like there isn’t a demand.
@axiomatic:
That’s what it sounds like to me. Some companies market 128kbps ISDN as “IDSL”. But a real DSL connection is generally at least 384kbps, sometimes up to 1.5mbps.
We just signed up with AT&T DSL (in a month to month way, as opposed to the one-year contract that they offer — both services cost the same, so I have no idea why they think we would take a year long contract). The CO is just across the street, and so far it’s been just fine.
When we first hooked up, we had an issue w/our router that no one at tech support could figure out after more than 2 hours of my husband being on the phone w/them — at which point I took over, and firmly but politely asked to be escalated. The Level 2 tech guy had us up and running in under 30 minutes. I’m glad that I had Consumerist-earned skills which obviously got the job done.
You guys really do need a t-shirt that says some version of “ESCALATE, ESCALATE, ESCALATE.”
Buran, it’s not WHO at all. It’s an automatic system that determines if you can get the service or not. It gives a yes or a no and the order is based off of that. However, the original distance is an electronic estimate from the CO or RT which can be off by several thousand feet. They don’t know the actual until it’s actually provisioned and physically hooked up. So that’s why sometimes people get the service and it doesn’t end up working out.
What Adaz says about distances is correct for DSL that piggy-backs off of a phone service like ATT. There are other services that do not operate this way that use a separate line that will go out up to 30,000 ft or so. Specifically I recall troubleshooting an actual ATT DSL tech’s DSL connection because he couldn’t get it through ATT because he was 25,000 ft out from the CO but he could get it through our service.
*THE EASY WAY TO CANCEL DSL WITH NO EARLY TERM FEE*
Step 1: Upgrade. Or downgrade. Or renew with a new rate. Have the rep (who is thrilled to get an upgrade sale) put you on a month to month rate. it starts in 5 days or so. No matter how far into your term you are, switching to a month to month plan makes you a month to month customer, as soon as the order posts.
Step 2: Call and cancel.
You’re welcome.
@YouPeople: That doesn’t always work if the rep notices that you should be in contract from the notes they will charge you the etf anyway.
ATT DSL customer services is a rip off. I have been without internet connection for the last 4 days!. Billing Dept and Tech support kept me bouncing around. Each one blame each other and the problem never was fixed.They even sent a tech to my home, just to find out: It is a billing problem!. But the billing dept. says again: Everything is ok with your account!. They kept giving me their same phone numbers and nobody cares. So I am switching to cable.