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Earthlink Pulling A Bait-n-Switch?
Matt LaPrairie writes: "Many of Earthlink's DSL customers signed up during their $39.95 per month promotion. This contract required a 6 month commitment on the part of the customer and they were told that the price would stay the same for the lifetime of the account. Well, Earthlink has raised its price to $49.95 for new customers (which is fine), but Earthlink is now charging everyone $49.95 - even those who signed up for the $39.95 "lifetime" promotion. They didn't even wait until the six month contract was up, much less honoring their promise of keeping the $39.95 price for the life of the account. The full story, including emails from customers and an Earthlink sales employee, can be found here: http://www.earthlinksucks.net/dslscam2.htm." While this site talks about a "quoted" price, does anyone have this claim in writing, or a screenshot of an ad with this price? Even if Earthlink has a good escape clause regarding the 39.95 price, this kind of situation seems a good justification for "-sucks" sites.
Although EL was founded by a Scientologist (sky dayton), Earthlink is a public company owned by its stockholders.
The wide majority of EL employees are not Scientologists.
Reed Slatkin has been accused of defauding mostly other Scientologists.
I would never put secret databases and monitoring behind the CO$, but until I see some kind of real evidence that EL itself is a party to this, it's just a rumour.
Fully buzzword compliant, but missing the point entirely.
DSL requires copper pairs from the DSL CPE to the DSLAM at the CO. Works great in "older" neighborhoods whose COs, known in Telco parlance as "wirecenters" really are that, wire centers. A building that has thousands of copper pairs running into it from the entire surrounding geographic area. The wire center makes a great place to put DSLAMs, since it has switching equipment, air conditioning, and more than likely an ATM OC-3 or OC-12 back to the regional central office.
Many new housing developments (new as in the past 5-10 years) are part of entirely new, far-flung semi-rural suburbs whose explosive growth coupled with developments in technology have made the traditional, high-density wire centers impractical. Instead copper is pulled from houses to a neighborhood concentrator and backhauled via fiber to either the "original" wire center or a new wire center.
In these cases DSL doesn't work because there's no place to put the DSLAMs. The neighborhood concentrators are in small metal boxes or in vaults where there's inadequate power, environmental controls or upstream connectivity for DSLAMs. However, some ILECs like Qwest have been talking about "extending DSL" by placing more DSLAMs in the field near the customers instead of relying solely on copper to the wirecenter. It's expensive because you need a mini-building or a hardened DSLAM, upstream connectivity, etc etc.
Your second line about use of frame-relay is pure BS. Many CLECs like Covad lease an essentially dry voice pair from the ILEC, but to the best of my knowledge they are not running channelized DS1 signalling and frame-relay encoding on these, they run DSL. Whether leasing a pair from the phone company is cost effective is debatable, but running DSLAMs in a zillion wire centers more than likely isn't.
DSL customer service sucks because the DSL business, at least from the ILEC perspective, is a huge capital investment and a major growth effort which saps people, management and cash resources quicker than they can be replaced. ISPs have *always* had shitty tech support, and that the most critical part of their customer connectivity is being handled by a third party (ILEC or CLEC DSL vendor) only makes it worse. That there's no competition doesn't help, but they have such a huge customer backlog that the whiners in the crowd who don't like it really don't matter.
Here we go, this might get long. I am a former Earthlink/Mindspring employee. Matt still works for Earthlink, as noted on earthlinksucks.net. He's a good guy. One of the greatest techs over in the PHX office.
.. when it was rolled out it was given as a disclaimer of "for new customers only" so those in which we told "yes" we actually had to sit there and tell them "Oh, we lied. teehee! Your loss, our gain!"
But ever since day one, EarthLink has experienced issues. I was there before the DSL department was officially created. I started off as a Dialup Customer Service in the SJE (San Jose, CA) office. Later on, my department was chosen (oh yay, at least I thought in the beginning) to become the first DSL Customer Service location. We were given a crash course in the products and services and how to contact/talk to vendors (At this time, it was still Mindspring so the only vendors were Covad and BellSouth). We got a lot of pissed off customers, believe you me. We still did when I finally left.
Customers set unreasonable expectations for us, as usual. But later on, the merger happened and everything and I do mean, everything.. went downhill.
First off, lets go over Earthlink's systems. They use Vantive. Vantive is the most ram hogging note taking database system I have EVER SEEN. You have to start up everything else before starting up vantive, because it's hardcoded into the program to take 80% of the available ram.
Then there is the inhouse accounting system. If you are a customer, may your account never become corrupted. It has really bad corrupting abilities. I begin to wonder if there's something in a hidden preferences section "Corrupt accounts when you 3 or more changes". If your account becomes corrupt, it can take 3 months or longer to get it fixed. Customer suffers because no one can put a priority on it, we have to let the account team take care of it. It's a hard to read system, espically billing.
We have access to vendors databases but that's not Earthlinks fault that those databases suck, or how much the telco's suck. One of them can be so inacruate.. very much so, that we see a date set for an appointment and it truely isn't set for that date, but we have no way to verify because 90% of the people who deal with the customers are not allowed to contact that specific vendor, so they are unaware.
The only thing from Mindspring that was taken into Earthlink was the CV&B's. Everything else was discarded, including what spirit there was with the employee's. After things went downhill, employee's started leaving because the spirit was shot down so badly.
Later on, a internal memo was posted from someone very high up in the company talking about how the stock was going downhill and the internally happenings and how he felt about them. There was a specific section that pissed off most of the employees. "If you do not have the power to cause changes, I don't want to know you or work with you". That cause a great war within. It took him 3 months to retract that statement, even then, it was only a minor appology.
Earthlink customers started calling when they heard rumors that they were going to reduce their price to 39.95, started calling and asking if they were able to recieve it. Now it had not been implemented at that point yet. We were told to tell them that "in time everyone will be switched over to 39.95"
Those are only some of the things that have happened. Covad is going downhill rapidly and is in the hole more than some telcos. There will be no one to pick up the pieces from that one.
There is more ugliness coming. I have it in good word. I congratulate those employees who stay there. I really do. I couldn't do it. I went completely bonkers after 1 year there.. and that was an extremely eventful year at that.
Here's an abbrivated version of my trials with Earthlink: For years, I was a netcom customer. A very happy customer. Then Netcom was bought by Mindspring, and I was a less happy customer. Then Mindspring was assimilated by Earthlink, and I became a very angry customer. I am now an Earthlink subscriber, not by choice, and I am leaving them just as soon as I can find a good DSL provider in my area. But I digress. Since Earthlink took over, the quality of service has plummeted. I get busy signals when I never did before, I am paying for 56K and I usually connect at 48 or 33.6! When I complain, I'm told that it must be a problem with my modem or my wiring, and when I reply that there was no problem until Earthlink took over, they DON'T REPLY! Recently, Earthlink "phased out" a bunch of Netcom dialups, and changed a bunch of DNS servers, and we Netcom subscribers couldn't login, and I wasn't able to get Email for two weeks. They did this without any advance warning, although they did see fit to send us Emails encouraging us to get our friends to switch to Earthlink.
Earthlink does suck, and why shouldn't they? They are the 800 pound gorilla of ISPs, and they really have no incentive to improve their service.
The contract did not state the price would not change. Customers are mistaken.
or
Earthlink made a mistake along the line of command and will quickly fix the problem.
As I said, I'm just an ex-customer, but I think someone needs to defend earthlink since they are probably the only decent national ISP left.
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Fitst of all, DSL requires a copper carrier. Fibre won't do.
Of course DSL requires a copper pair... That's what DSL is... Do you complain that wireless ethernet is limited because it excludes wires? If you happen to have Fiber to the Curb, DSL isn't the service you go seeking. DSL is a broadband copper pair high speed data solution. When you say "modern developments", are you implying places where the entire housing development is behind a digital loop carrier? There are solutions for that. DLCs aren't something the architects of DSL "just forgot about".
Second, probably the msot common method of dhoking off bandwidth to DSL customers is by providing them a seperate frame-relay circut, managed by the company providing the ISP portion of the DSL service
What is this frame relay circuit thing you are talking about? Are you talking about the pvc? I'm pretty well versed with DSL, and I have no idea what you are talking about. Maybe you're talking about the connection to the DSLAM? The subscriber management box? You know worst case an ISP must have a single high speed WAN connection to each CO, not each customer (it generally isn't that bad, but no matter). Even cable has a single point where data must be transferred to and carried by some other wide area transport.
Oh, and a single ATU-C line card handles about 8 ADSL connections.
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
Before this place becomes overwhelmed by claims that EarthLink is charging this increase retroactively. This price increase will only affect new sign-ups and customers whose original contract has expiried.
Something nobody has caught here yet as far as I have seen is that there is absolutely no charge for setup or equipment under the new contract. Where for a time there was a 100$ fee for equipment and provisioning under the 39.95$ deal.
A quick check of the math reveals this is basically the same deal (+/- 20$ a year) for new customers. For existing customers it is unfortunate but as revenues from advertising decrease and prices for bandwidth go up the market reflects those changes and prices reflect the market.
Not a scam just a sound business model. Besides this isn't exactly fair coverage as the decision to go to 49.95 a month was also made by SBC, Verizon, and others almost simultaneous to EarthLink's decision. Not all of them are offering free set-up at this time either.
R_V_Winkle
What is described here is, if accurate, either breach of contract or simple fraud. These customers weren't sold up the line, but rather down the river.
This next song is very sad. Please clap along. -- Robin Zander
There definately is something to that; that DSL companies as a whole aren't doing much to try to keep their customers. There are two issues that come to mind here. I'm not sure if either explain the behavior of ISPs that provide DSL service, rather than the Telcos that provide their end of the service.
DSL is an overly expensive stop-gap technology rolled out to bring broad-band to the masses upon demanr, rather than waiting until a more appropriate technology is produced. DSL relies on two ancient technologies, from a Telco perspective. Fitst of all, DSL requires a copper carrier. Fibre won't do. This is why a lot of modern developments can't utilize DSL service, leaving their residents at the mercy of Cable providers, which represent thr 3rd or 4th most evil set om monopolies out there.
Second, probably the msot common method of dhoking off bandwidth to DSL customers is by providing them a seperate frame-relay circut, managed by the company providing the ISP portion of the DSL service. This is why DSL isn't truly cost effective. There is the cost of the frame-relay circut and the cost of an upgraded line card (which is what the other end of your phone line is connected to) that allows for the splitting out of the data portion of the DSL service, to be routed through the frame-relay circut.
To summarize, DSL makes use of two vary old technologies, a non-cost-effective manner.
DSL companies are probably realizing that their cost of customer aquisition was too high and to make up the difference, they cut down on the post aquisition technical support. From a business standpoint, there is something to be said for this strategy. For the moment most customers have only one of the two broadband options (DSL/Cable) and even at that, the regional market concentration is extremely high. The corporate think might go like this: "We don't need to spend money retaining customers because once we get them hooked on broadband, where else are they going to go?". Since they spend so liberally on customer aquisition, they need to make cuts in other areas in order to keep their business viable. It really is a bad deal all around. Customers aren't the only ones getting screwed here, Telcos are hurting becaause they don't have a more robust and/or cost effective broadband solution, and the ISPs that got into DSL were conned into it by the lure of a vast untapped market, which it turns out isn't nearly as forgiving as that of dialup network service.
--CTH
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