Mad As Hell About Dsl - Brief Article

Kiplinger's Personal Finance Magazine, July, 2001 by Kristin Davis

BOILING POINT | Getting high-speed INTERNET SERVICE installed can be agonizingly slow.

LOST ORDERS. No-show technicians. Bungled installation attempts. Coast to coast, customers who thought they were signing up for a high-speed digital subscriber line (DSL) Internet connection are seething instead of surfing.

Dan Duffany is typical. Last fall he took off a number of days from work to wait for installers, who stood him up. When he finally gave up on EarthLink, his first-choice DSL provider, he had to fight the company to avoid a $100 termination fee.

After switching to Verizon, he made "no fewer than ten phone calls, with an average wait time of an hour and a half" over several months--and still no service. Finally, Duffany, who lives in New York City, filed a complaint with the New York State Public Service Commission. When the commission took an interest, Duffany began getting calls from Verizon executives. But it still took weeks--during which his regular phone line went dead--before his modem finally displayed what Duffany calls "the steady green light of happiness."

Even then, his DSL line wasn't up to speed. Duffany spent dozens more hours on the phone with tech-support reps, who were sometimes "snotty" and often undertrained, before Verizon figured out that it had set his line for a lower-speed service than the one for which he was paying a premium.

`Total incompetence'

WOULD-BE DSL customers, from the merely perturbed to the apoplectic, pour out their pain on Web sites devoted to DSL Internet service--or a lack thereof. "I spent literally hours on hold." "No one ever showed up." "Total incompetence from start to finish."

"Don't know a computer from a microwave oven." Even after service is up and running, customers complain, it's often slow or stalls altogether.

Frustrated consumers are also venting their wrath in numerous class-action lawsuits. One suit against Verizon complains about service slowdowns and outages, as well as miserable customer service and tech support. The Utility Consumers' Action Network in California, which has filed a suit against Pacific Bell, vilifies the company for losing orders, making billing errors, and interfering with DSL orders from competitors. Some providers, such as NorthPoint, have gone out of business, taking their DSL lines down with them and, in North Point's case, leaving more than 100,000 customers without service.

What's going on here? Simply put, the initial demand for DSL--driven in part by aggressive advertising--has outstripped the ability of phone companies and others to provide service. Many Web posters complain that they were told they could get DSL, only to learn when the installer arrived that the service wasn't available yet in their area. The Utility Consumers' Action Network suit against Pacific Bell charges that the company began advertising DSL service long before it had the network and the technicians to install it over a wide area.

Pacific Bell's parent company, SBC Communications, acknowledges that the high demand for DSL has caused service delays. But the company insists that it has cut the wait for DSL service in half, staffed up its customer support, and cut down on installation hassles with a do-it-yourself procedure that 70% of customers now use. "We've made significant progress," says SBC spokesman Shawn Dainas. (Verizon didn't return our calls seeking comment.)

Need for speed

FEW PEOPLE who have had a taste of high-speed surfing want to go back to waiting for Web pages to load via a 56K modem. While complaints persist, the number of Web posters reporting a relatively trouble-free experience seems to be on the rise. "If your house or apartment wiring is good and your computer is reasonably up to date, you may have very little problem getting online," says Justin Beech, founder and CEO of DSLreports.com. "It's a bit of a lottery." To improve your odds:

Try cable-modem service, if it's available in your area. Delivered by the same coaxial cable that brings CNN to your TV, cable-modem Internet service, from providers such as Road Runner and @Home, is at least as fast as DSL. Like DSL, it doesn't tie up your phone line while you surf or send e-mail. And it seems to generate far fewer customer complaints.

Cable-modem service isn't perfect, however. For one thing, you share bandwidth with your neighbors, which means that service can slow significantly when everyone else is online. Online gamers, in particular, often prefer the consistent speed of a DSL connection.

Avoid the most-complained-about providers in your area. DSLreports.com rates DSL and cable providers, and operates a forum on which you can read how others have fared.

Appeal to your state's public utilities commission if you have problems with installation or service that involve your phone company. Some PUCs are more responsive than others (find yours at www.naruc.org/stateweb .htm). In Duffany's case, filing a complaint got higher-ups to take notice.

Wait for the market to settle. Even the most outraged Web posters seem to be willing to endure whatever it takes to get faster Web access. But you could spare yourself considerable frustration by hanging back until high-speed surfing is a gentler sport--that is, until cable comes to your area, or the phone companies and other DSL providers are less overwhelmed and more experienced at fixing problems. "I think that within a year DSL will be as straightforward to install as dial-up Internet access," predicts Beech.--Reporter: ERIN BURT