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Complaint Repair in the
News
January
29, 2001
Wired News
From Wired News, available
online at:
http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,41433,00.html
Full Text of Article:
DSL Rhymes With Hell
by Joanna Glasner
2:00 a.m. Jan. 29,
2001 PST
Few people would seem
less likely to use Verizon for their high-speed
Internet service than Marcus Lewis.
Lewis, the owner of
a tennis center in Leominster, Massachusetts,
hates the phone company so much that he created a website dedicated to
bashing it.
After the telco --
which recently changed its name from Bell Atlantic
to Verizon -- repeatedly messed up the installation of a multi-party
phone system for his business last year, Lewis registered the domains
BellAtlanticPathetic.com and VerizonPathetic.com in a gesture of
protest. Since then, he's been on a mission to convince others to
avoid the company.
Given that backdrop,
it seemed like an odd turn of behavior last month
when Lewis went ahead and ordered Verizon DSL service. Predictably,
installing the high-speed Internet service turned out to be a
nightmare for him, and he ended up griping and whining about it.
"I know I made
a mistake trying to order DSL service through those
idiots," he ranted, defending his decision by saying that there were
no other high-speed Internet providers in the neighborhood.
"I had no choice.
I really needed the high-speed access," he said.
"And if getting it meant dealing with Verizon, then so be it."
Lewis isn't alone
in his willingness to put up with a lot in the name
of high-speed Internet access.
In the weeks since
he posted his high-speed Internet experiences on
his site, DSL horror stories from other Verizon customers have rolled
into his message boards and e-mail inbox on a daily basis.
Installation troubles were among the problems cited in a federal class
action lawsuit filed last week against the New York company.
It's not just Verizon,
either. Installation horror stories abound on
complaint sites and message boards across the Web. There's the guy who
got transferred from help line to help line in a time-consuming quest
to get his service to work as promised. Then there was the subscriber
who missed six days of work awaiting home visits from DSL technicians.
And of course, all those people who spent hours on hold waiting for
tech support had plenty to complain about.
"A lot of people
are finding it a lot more difficult to install DSL
than they originally thought," said Daryl Schoolar, ISP strategies
analyst with Cahners In-Stat Group.
Yet there's a flip
side. As much as everybody complains about their
DSL provider, they hate it even more when they're not around.
"What people
are losing sight of is for every complaint we get about
service providers, there's another complaint from someone who wants
the service in their town," said Verizon spokesman Larry Plum.
Verizon estimates
that it had 540,000 DSL subscribers at the end of
2000 -- an increase of 600 percent in the course of a year.
DSL, or "digital
subscriber line" service -- which delivers high-speed
data over standard phone lines -- ranks second to cable modems as the
most popular residential high-speed Internet service. The number of
DSL subscribers has surged in the past year as a result of greater
availability and demand from customers hungry for high-speed access. A
DSL line operates as much as dozens of times faster than a dial-up
connection.
Schoolar estimates
that at the end of 2000, there were 1.8 million
residential DSL customers in the United States. On average, DSL
providers are seeing their customer base grow by 40 to 60 percent
every three months.
DSL providers and
incumbent local phone companies have allocated huge
sums to finance that growth. SBC (SBC), which owns local phone
companies serving about one-third of the U.S. population, laid out $6
billion last summer to expand the number of households eligible for
DSL. Verizon has also put billions into its efforts.
Add in the sums spent by the regional Bells and scores of startups
such as Covad and DSL.net seeking to compete with the local phone
monopolies, and you're talking serious cash.
The problem that some
DSL customers and their lawyers are running
into, however, is that companies aren't getting the service up and
running as quickly as they expect.
"Verizon spends
a lot of time on advertising and promoting the
service," said Alex Barnett, an attorney at Cohen, Milstein, Hausfeld
& Toll, which brought the suit. "They don't spend that kind of
time on
customer services."
Since the case was
filed last week, the phones at the law firm have
been ringing continuously with calls from customers complaining about
their DSL service. A particularly common beef -- and one cited in the
suit -- is that many users who purchase the service are unable to
install it.
Other service providers
are drawing similar complaints.
Chad Retelle, an IT
manager in San Francisco, ordered DSL from Pacific
Bell in June, and proceeded to spend the next seven weeks trying to
get it to work. Troubles included a delay in receiving equipment for
self-installation, an unsuccessful technician visit and weeks of phone
calls to company support lines. Since it's been activated, however,
Retelle said the service has worked fairly well.
DSL-related rants
have been on the rise on complaint message boards as
well, said Matt Smith, founder of the gripe-posting site
Complaint Repair
Irate customers have
made much of the fact that the word Bell happens
to rhyme with Hell (as does DSL). Examples abound of postings such as
the one on a DSLreports message board: "Bellsouth should change its
name to Hellsouth." BellAtlanticPathetic.com has an entire section
labeled the "Bell Hell Bulletin Board."
Schoolar believes
the troubles stem from the fact that this is a
relatively new service. He predicts it will take a year or so for DSL
providers to simplify the installation process enough to stem the tide
of complaints.
Another factor that
has affected a small percentage of DSL subscribers
is the rapid rate at which many high-speed Internet service providers
and carriers have gone out of business.
Despite steeply rising
demand, a number of startup DSL firms have
either shut down or scaled back operations in recent months. In the
last two months, two carriers -- privately held Digital Broadband and
NorthPoint Communications -- filed for bankruptcy.
Other DSL firms such
as Covad Communications and PSINet, faced with
growing expenses and a difficult investment climate for
telecommunications companies, have laid off a substantial portion of
their staffs in recent months.
The rash of closures
has forced thousands of DSL customers to switch
providers, creating yet another source of DSL discontent, said Justin
Beech, founder of the website DSLreports.
However, the dismal
investment climate shouldn't overshadow more
positive developments in the DSL business, Beech said. He believes
many DSL providers took a sensible step last year when they made it
possible for customers to activate service themselves.
Besides sparing subscribers
the hassle of having to take off from work
to wait for a technician visit, self-installation also benefits
providers.
"I think over
the long term it has to be the solution. You can't
afford to have a truck roll up every time you start the service,"
said
Schoolar, who believes the do-it-yourself approach will help DSL
spread faster.
He's talking some
serious numbers, too. By the end of 2002, Schoolar
predicts that 8.5 million U.S. households will be DSL customers.
How many of those
millions of customers will actually have their DSL
installed and running, however, is another question.
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