jotsheet

In my seething rage at IKEA, I sorta forgot to mention how much SBC DSL blows too. Better complain about that.

Babysitting SBC

First of all, it took them for goddamn ever to get my shit set up. Back in September, I called them and told them I wanted everything for September 28 — phone line and DSL. On October 3, I didn’t even have a dial tone. They sent some guy out, he fixed a problem outside the building (so I didn’t get charged), and I got a dial tone and gave a bleating cheer.

Waited for the green DSL light to come on. Never happened. I guess the SBC phone service people and the SBC DSL people can’t communicate with one another, because I had to make about five phone calls (no exagerration) to get these assclowns out to my apartment to then fix the DSL. And during those five calls, they’d give me wildly different information; the first guy told me to “just wait” for the DSL to become active, the second chick said that there was no way it would work unless they sent out a repair guy. (So then I asked her point-blank: “Why did that other guy tell me something completely opposite? I told him exactly what I told you. She didn’t have a ready-made answer in her manual for that one.)

I finally got the DSL in the middle of October, over two weeks after I’d originally requested it.

SBC was kind enough to send me a confirmation letter in the mail saying I’d ordered the “Express Service.” Actually, I’d ordered the faster “Pro Service.” Called them up again, asked them wtf, they told me to ignore the letter. Okay.

So once I’d passed through the 36 chambers and actually gotten DSL, I decided to do a speed test. You see, the faster SBC DSL service is supposed to give up you up to 3.0 Mbps. Well, I was getting 1.6 Mbps. The cheaper service gives you up to 1.5 Mbps. So I figured, what the heck, downgrade and loose 0.1 Mbps, right? I confirmed that they’d cap my thoroughput at 1.5 and then downgraded.

Fast forward to today. Here are the results of a Speakeasy speed test (great site, btw):

Less than 1.3 Mbps. So basically, the customer service apes at SBC are unable to get anything right.

It’s a racket

Also, this entire experience confirms my long-held suspicion than SBC intentionally fucks up their own phone line infrastructure, just so they can make money by:

1. Sending out their repair guys to fix problems and charging you for them, and/or
2. Selling that $3/mo “linebacker” shit.

I mean, why is it that every goddamn time someone moves out, the phone line in their apartment magically “breaks” and then SBC has to send someone out to fix it? It’s a racket. I’m serious. What other industry has such a rickety infrastructure that it can’t even handle customer stops and starts without a repair?

I should have just gotten cable Internet. (Too bad Comcast was incompetent too, making it 3-for-3 with corporate incompetence for SBC, Comcast, and IKEA.) I may still switch, or maybe I’ll just move over to Cyberonic DSL, which is more expensive but gloriously reliable.

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