AT&T - SCREWING OVER CUSTOMERS

29th October 2009


AT&T IS OUT FOR THEMSELVES - AGAIN
WHO CARES ABOUT THE CUSTOMER


I live in Lawrenceville, Georgia and it seems this city is a hot bed for the AT&T Corporation. Fifteen to twenty years ago this city was a burgeoning one that was growing by leaps and bound and Bell South decided this was going to be one of their examples of the new age. They laid fiber optic from every corner of this city and for the time, it was one of the greatest examples of technology advancements in North America. The problem became known that as the rest of the world leaped frog Lawrenceville, neither Bell South nor AT&T has updated the equipment to match the expansive data needs of the average household with the residence of this very well established city dragging, just like the AT&T DSL speeds lug.

I have many problems with AT&T, but I will focus on this single issue. I force my roommate to call for AT&T support, because the customer service is so lousy that I will end up yelling at the poor people on the other end of the phone. I promised myself that I won’t get angry like that any longer, so I force him to call for lousy support and given his normally calm nature, I laugh when he gets frustrated and starts to get angry. He always use to tell me that no one can be that bad to invoke someone to start yelling at them; however he has a better understanding of why and how their insipid responses may annoy a person.

Everyone in Lawrenceville, Georgia is experiencing slowness with their DSL service, especially in the evening and night times when the largest number of people are surfing the internet. That makes since, but when we pay for a T-1 or 1.5mbps rate for our DSL service and AT&T delivers 138kbps starting around 6:00 PM every evening, there becomes a problem. For more than six months we’ve been calling AT&T Support requesting our issues to be addressed, only to hear that the problem is on our side. Well my twenty-three years of technology background knew that it wasn’t, but you still have to jump through their hoops before they will escalate the call to a level two support person or even a supervisor.

We’ve had countless people come out to the house and none of them would tell us what we heard today. Finally we received an answer that makes since…AT&T has been receiving for the past year, hordes of complaints and loosing customers due to this very DSL issue, but they won’t resolve the problem until first or second quarter of 2010. The way AT&T is correcting the issues felt by so many over this year, is to push all of these customers that are experiencing such horrible slowness in their DSL lines, by forcing them to migrate onto their new U-VERSE platform. The problem is that if they won’t resolve problems that they’ve known about for years, why would any of us want to remain with them and pay more for a new platform? On top of migrating everyone over to this new more costly platform, they expect us to pay for more services by them by offering bundled services like Cable Television, DSL and Phone services all through a single connection. Are we supposed to believe that if we receive the same type of issues with U-Verse that we have with DSL that we then loose all of our modern functionality as apposed to right now just loosing a single function? Not to mention, to bundle more services with the same company that has been screwing us for the past year and expecting to get away with it because they are so large? Why would any company think that this type of service would result in customers that want to remain with them?

The reason AT&T continues to think that this type of behavior is okay, is because they’ve been doing this to customers for years. They not only expect that they can continue to charge us for top rated speeds with our DSL Service and not provide what we’re paying for; or that they can screw thousands of households in an entire city and tell them they have to deal with subordinate services until next year because they keep doing it time and time again. But I have instructions for every household in Lawrenceville, Georgia and around North America; if AT&T is pulling the same type of disrespect on you, go to http://www.fcc.gov and file a complaint against the Telecom Giant and stand before Goliath with your sling with confidence that you do have a chance against a MONSTER who cares little about you (a simple number).

The problem is when companies like AT&T get to be as large as they are, they loose sight of the reasons they are in business…and it’s not because of shareholders and profits margins…its about the people we call CUSTOMERS! All of the large corporations in North America need us, the customers, but they have staffs filled with number crunchers who tell them they can loose X number of customers every day and every month because they will receive X number in exchange. That may very well be true, but I would rather work at a company that isn’t the largest, but makes a decent profit every year and CARES ABOUT THEIR CUSTOMERS while they provide their services or products. Greed isn’t about wanting to make money, it’s when a board of directors and shareholder expectations go beyond what is in the best interest of the ones you serve.

If you think you are experiencing issues with your DSL speed or want to find out what your internet speeds is, you may use any of the following links:
http://speakeasy.net
http://speedtest.net
http://helpme.att.net
http://www.digitallanding.com/high-speed-internet/
When you run any of these test sites, you will have two speeds listed: a download speed (this is everything that you do on the internet, surfing any site like facebook.com or myspace.com, downloading files, video, streaming music or playing internet games) and then there is an upload speed (this is the speed for when you up load any file or data to the internet, computer or network). The download speed will be the faster of the two numbers, or should be. We’ve had cases where we measured a download speed and it shows to be lower than the upload speed and that is just atrocious, but par for the course for the service with AT&T. The upload speed will vary based on what you’re paying for, but in our case we pay for a direct fiber optic line from the CO (green box with all of the phone and DSL connections in your neighborhood) and we are guaranteed at least 1.5kbps or 1500kbps. Your service may be less than that, so it is prudent that you call and ask your provider for what speed ratings you should be receiving.

The upload speed will only be in the 300kbps range and we normally see our average around 250kbps. There are times when we measure spike upwards of the high 3XXkbps. Again it would be prudent for you to question your service provider to ascertain what speed you should see on a regular basis. It is common to see some fluxation in these speed test based on times of higher usage. Think about it with common sense and when everybody in your neighborhood, town or city is home and surfing the Internet; then lines may be slower during those times as apposed to when everyone is away and few people are surfing the web.

Companies like AT&T will continue to abuse us, the customers until we stand up as a collective and tell them, “We won’t take it any longer.” You do that by filing a grievance against AT&T with the FCC or by taking your business elsewhere.


Your humble servant – Todd M Dobson