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Thoughts On Third-Party DSL Providers?
drut asks: "Due to a power surge last week, I lost my link at home. As a result of this, I've learned the frustrating truth of how my DSL provider processes its work orders that have to deal when the actual DSL line is involved. My provider, Flashcom, works with Covad and Bell Atlantic to give me Internet access. Due to legal issues involved in the ownership of the physical phone lines, I spent a week just having them go through the red tape of contacting one company, having them issue a work order with another company, then having the second company issue a work order with the third company, making me three times removed from the problem. Because of this system, no one at the first (Flashcom) or second (Covad) companies have any idea of the status of the problem, and don't have any contact information for the third company (Bell Atlantic). With all this hassle, next time I sign up for DSL (maybe I'll switch to cable), I'll probably sign up directly with the phone company, if they offer the service. This seems like an unfair advantage to the other companies. " Has anyone else had problems like this?
With the ones I have been involved with from an engineering and implementation standpoint they mostly used a redback switch as the main engine and in very cludgy ways wired in the authentication systems such as Radius. Most of the tpp are also selling batter and ground for local loop service that adds to the complication and because of this they don't own any repeaters because the costs are to high to integrate the DSL repeater with the local loop. This rsults in only getting access within a couple of miles of the CoLo. Anything further is done through resale agreements with still other DSL providers.
I finally had enough in my Bell Atlantic service area and went with a cable modem instead. So far service has been great the speeds are more than fast enough and as long as you secure your box in a reasonable manner it seems to be pretty secure. I get the service for about $34 a month and have wired all the workstations in the house through the one cable modem and this turned out to be much cheaper than the DSL service and with the exception of one outage when a telephone pole was hit near my house, service has been 100%.
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I have the Bell Atlantic's DSL and I'm sorry to say that they are not any better. If you have any type of problem, they take your call assign a ticket number and then tell you "If your problem persists in three days call us back and open a new ticket."
They used to call you back and let you know the status, or call the CO directly for updates for you but in the last several months they have eliminated that. Now, you just wait.
I have had DSL for close to 18 months from Bell Atlantic. Originally there product was based on static IP addresses and recently they have moved to DHCP and the PPPOE standard. When I made some changes to my account at the end of March, they needed to convert me to the new standard. I was given April 6th as a new activation date with the new setup, which was about 2.5 weeks from when I called the changes in. SIX weeks later, they finally got my account functional and it took CONSTANT calls to support from me and hours on the phone.
To make matters worse, up to recently you could wait 1 hour to get through to the first tier support. After they found that they could not help you, you would wait another hour for the second tier of support. I have to admit that has gotten much better recently.
In summary, stay away from Bell Atlantic at all costs. You would think that they would be able to handle difficulties more quickly, but I think it is better to have a third party fight your battles for you. If you have lots of free time and a hands free phone maybe you won't mind.
-BKuhl
They have an utterly horrid reputation among the DSL community of being unresponsive, delay-prone, and having billing problems galore, among others. I think it's a matter of trying to be too big, too fast. That said, I'm a happy customer because:
(a) I only use them for my home pipe and DNS - I provide my own mail and web server. Unless I'm down, I only have to contact hostmaster if I create a new host entry. Other than one outage in August that lasted about a day, I haven't had any reason to contact support or billing since I got the service last spring.
(b) When I got the router, I configured it myself and they don't even have the password. So if I want to cange something I don't have to wait for them.
The way DSL installs work is that the DSL provider (several companies like Covad or, in my case, Northpoint) leases the UNE (Unbundled Network Elements or, in this case, the copper loop itself) from the ILEC. They pay around $8/month for this. Covad provides the DSLAM (DSL Access Multiplexer) in your CO, too. They partition it into several VPN's, one for each ISP that they work with at that CO. Flashcom is just one of the ISP's that works with Covad in your area - they provide the "value-added" services of email (outsourced, but I don't remember who), web hosting, Usenet (outsourced to Supernews), billing, etc. Most of the DSL ISP's, ironically, outsource in turn virtually all of their operation but the billing and DNS.
In fact, here in Massachusetts many of Bell Atlantic's Infospeed DSL customers are actually wholesale customers - serviced through a different ISP.
The biggest problem for DSL service is this: DSL is a non-tariffed service (unlike, say, POTS, ISDN or T-1). There's no service guarantee associated with it, and if it's out there's no grounds for you to report anyone to your state's DPU. If your ISP is unresponsive, that's a problem in getting the wholesaler notified properly. If the wholesaler and ILEC are on bad terms (Covad has a reputation here for a fairly adversarial relationship with BA), then the ILEC may "misplace" service requests for a while - that's just how they are. For $8/month, the ILEC generally isn't too motivated to help out.
One thing that can help is to cultivate a good relationship with the local ILEC techs if you have the opportunity. Who works on what at a CO is rigidly determined by rules (ILEC techs are not allowed to touch stuff belonging to their co-located CLEC's), but if one of the techs is friendly with you, they may just take care of the problem if they happen to hear about it. Easy fixes can happen that way.
As far as the CPE, you own that - though Flashcom bought it. Your contract paid for it. If it's burned out, you should be able to contact the manufacturer yourself and get it replaced. Or you can settle the matter by buying another one - DSL routers are getting cheap. Good luck either way.
- -Josh Turiel
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
Hi!
Your post ends with the magic words:
"With all this hassle, next time I sign up for DSL (maybe I'll switch to cable), I'll probably sign up directly with the phone company, if they offer the service. This seems like an unfair advantage to the other companies."
As it happens, Bell Atlantic is in hot water on this very subject. The State of New York just fined BA $10 million for anticompetitive practices with regard to competitive local exchange carriers (CLECs) and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania's Public Utility Commission has gone so far as to require BA to divest their retail phone operations (so the "wholesale distribution" side treats all carriers equally). The state's Consumer Advocate is presently on a campaign about businesses that have been harmed when they switched to a CLEC, and Bell dropped all mention of them from directory assistance.
In other words, the regulators are watching. If BA is jerking around CLEC DSL customers while providing a different level of service to its own customers, that's anticompetitive.
Call your state legislator--ask him or her to ask the Public Utility Commission for information on resolving complaints about poor DSL service. You may have to explain DSL to the kid who answers the phone (he's a political science major/groupie) but legislators love constituent service opportunities like this. They will ask for pertinent information (so the letter can say, "My good friend Elmer Stutzenfreud (Circuit ID #17X933099J32, Covad ID# 234234234, BA Repair order #NY0339993A3) has mentioned to me the severe impact of a DSL outage on his business....")
Regulated monopolies have zero incentive to listen to consumers. But they live and die by the whim of the legislature--and the legislators know it. Call your state rep or state senator, and ask for help.
P.S.: There is a quid to the pro quo: when your legislator comes up for reelection he will ask for your vote. If he has done an effective job representing your interests, you probably should vote for him.
This is a sad, sad state of affairs (but the experiences that the author describes are far from uncommon). The reality is that as long as a single organization gets to mediate access to the physical copper plant *and* to make money off of advanced services provided on that plant.
We all paid for the copper decades ago. In fact, we paid for it again, because of some creative acconting that the Baby Bells (RBOCs) used in the late 90s (96-97) becuase they convinced regulators and auditors that they were planning on replacing the entire copper plant with fiber and so they should be able to write the whole thing off since it was worthless. Copper. Worthless. You know how DSL gets into your house? Copper. Hmmmmmm.
I work at an ISP that provides DSL from three different carriers, two of them CLECS (competitive local exchange carriers) and one an RBOC (regional bell operating company - US West). The three-party problems that the author described have been made *much* worse by Covad's unwillingness to deal directly with smaller ISPs (they now want a minimum 20,000 - 25,000 line commitment) so most of the people providing Covad DSL don't have a relationship with Covad; they are reselling DSL services from some other regional ISP (increasing the problems to 4 parties!).
One thing we keep telling commercial customers who are compelled by the low prices of DSL: When your T1 line goes down we have a $200-400 / month stick to beat up the phone company with. Mean time to respond for us (we have hundreds of circuits) is about 1 hour, mean time to repair is about 2 hours. When your DSL line goes down we have a $19 / month stick to beat up the phone company with and we can't even talk to them. We have to call the DSL carrier who has to beat them up with the $19 twig. It takes a week. Sometimes longer.
This is the key problem with DSL: enterprise speeds with romper room repair times. In the the current setup there is no obvious way to fix it.
Lily Tomlin was correct. They're the phone company, they don't have to care. Here's why. Covad/Northpoint/Whomever pays the ILEC - be it Bell Atlantic, US West, PacBell, whatever - a grand total of around $7 a month for each copper pair used for DSL. This doesn't precisely make the telco wanna jump when your circuit goes down.
From the DSL Provider side, an interesting statistic from Covad that we finally managed to get out of them - AFTER we threatened to leave for another Provider - is that overall, 85% of the calls that they recieve from their ISP partners are a No Trouble Found call. This means that some total twit on the ISP's front line gets a call saying that a DSL line doesn't work, doesn't bother to have the router or DSL modem powercycled, and doesn't bother to check if all the cables are seated properly before they turn around and call the DSL provider to have them troubleshoot. So when you have a legitimate line issue, like an open in your circuit, it's got to get through the 85% noise before it's considered an actual signal problem. There are a few ISPs that don't do that. We actually have a 5% No Trouble Found ratio with Covad. I don't know who the worst offenders are on this, but I DO know that Concentric is one of them.
RBOCs are LAZY. Good example? We deal with mostly East Coast customers. Bell Atlantic's repair department is open Monday through Friday 9am to 5pm. Which means that if your DSL line goes down late Friday afternoon, and it's because of a break in the circuit halfway between you and the CO, you don't have a prayer of getting it fixed until probably Tuesday. And Bell Atlantic's techs are notorious for exerting themselves to find out why they aren't the problem.
Outages. DSL is highly outage-prone because in a lot of ways it still is in a Beta phase. The 12-hour outage that someone mentioned in Los Angeles I happen to know involved a massive conference call with Covad's switch and telco vendors, their entire Network Operations department, and about half of the Senior VPs in the company in an effort to get this fixed. Our company had been through something similar prior to that, and I know for a fact that they were working their butts off to get it back up and running. They then went through their network and made VERY sure that it wouldn't happen again. But new hardware fails. you take it as it goes.
ISPs tend to be lazy on the front lines, so you may have to push hard to get results. Remember that these front line techs could be handling everything from dialup to T1, so they're busy as hell with people wanting to get their pr0n. If you've got a commercial circuit, make sure your ISP has a commercial support department.
DSL IS NOT AN INTELLIGENT CHOICE FOR MISSION CRITICAL SERVICES!!!!! I cannot count the number of people who go with a DSL line to save a lot of money when they set up their e-commerce webserver and then scream about losing hundreds and thousands of dollars an hour because their DSL line is down. If you absolutely, positively MUST be connected 24/7 and need a high speed connection, get a T1. Oh. And don't use DSL to back up DSL. If one goes down, so will the other 99% of the time. It's just a waste of money.
I hope that someone gets something out of this, and actually manages to avoid a fatal mistake. As a further note, when you've got a solid DSL line, it's worth it's weight in gold. I've got a 1.5/384 Rate Adaptive line - what people were talking about when they mentioned the Commited Information Rate - through Speakeasy.net, and I've had only one problem with it, caused by a regional outage with Covad. Enjoy!
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