Last week I’ve had a real unfortunate experience with AT&T: Our phone line (which includes DSL) was down for a whole 4 days, from Monday morning to Friday morning. This is by far the most severe outage I have ever experienced, and suffice to say I am extremely annoyed with AT&T’s ineptitude, and their obvious lack of concern for their customers. I first reported the problem Monday morning at 10AM, but it took them until the next day before they even sent someone out there. And after that, it took them another 3 days to determine that during a recent maintenance at a node in the phone line they had incorrectly connected our line. Part of the problem seems to be that they are apparently working with 3rd party contractors to perform much of the actual maintenance work, which adds another layer of inefficiency on top of an already messed up company…
I have mostly been lucky with my phone / DSL service for the past few years (up until we moved to San Mateo last year), but this was the third outage in only 6 months (the first one lasted about a day, the second one a few hours). This seems absolutely unacceptable for a technology that should be mature by now…
We will be moving to Palo Alto in about a month, which means that it’s time to pick a new provider for our phone, TV, and Internet services. Last week’s outage combined with the recent bad press about the fact that AT&T is willing to spy on their customers on behalf of the NSA, RIAA, and MPAA simplifies my choice by eliminating AT&T from the list of contenders. I still need to pick between Comcast, RCA, and perhaps other options, but at least I won’t have to be an AT&T customer any more (OK, that’s unfortunately only half true: I am still using their mobile service. Perhaps I should consider switching to Spring or Verizon when my contract is up…).