The excitement of modern life

[gvdub]

We got an offer in the mail last month for Earthlink's new High Speed DSL and Home Phone service: 8 Mbs DSL service with full-blown phone service that has all the bells and whistles and unlimited local and long distance calling. It's at a good price, too, so we signed up, figuring that it will save us a bunch by not having to pay AT&T and Sprint bills on top of Earthlink every month. The service was supposed to switch over last Thursday. Sure enough, the phone went dead and DSL ceased at noon on Thursday. Breathlessly we waited for the new service to kick in - and waited, and waited, etc. We did start breathing again, but it's only just today that we once again have all service working (we got phones working last Saturday). It only took 6.5 hours on my cell phone with Earthlink Customer Support and a household visit from a Covad tech, once I was finally able to convince Earthlink that there was an actual physical problem with the line at our house. The key was going out of the house to a wireless access point and doing a little search to find the EL Priority Service line that actually gets you a U.S. based tech, rather than somebody reading from a scriptbook in Hyderabad. By that time, though, we couldn't get a tech here until today.

I gotta say that in almost 12 years of being with Earthlink, this is the first time that support has been any kind of a problem. I suppose that's pretty good considering what I hear about the state of support from many other ISPs, but it was still an amazingly frustrating experience, not to mention that more than half of my "anytime" minutes for the cell phone were eaten up on hold listening to badly deteriorated recordings of light jazz and the same 2 minute loop of Beethoven over and over and over.