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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.
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.
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.
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