Rolla P Huff
Chairman, Earthlink Inc.
1375 Peachtree Street
Atlanta,GA 30309
Dear Mr. Huff:
I'm writing you this letter in the Alameda Public Library, in Alameda, California. That's where I've been all week, using the library's free wireless, despite the fact that I have been paying your company $79.95 per month for several years for Internet access, a high-speed DSL connection, and telephone service through voice-over-internet-protocol.
If you look at the email address I will append to the bottom of this letter (although I will not post it on my blog, which is where this letter is also going), you will notice it has a curious suffix: ix.netcom.com. I am assuming that you will know by its form that this is a very old email address and that I have been a customer of your company or one of its predecessors for more than 10 years. Actually, I think it's been something like 13 years, which is, as you know, several generations in Internet time.
About three years ago I began to receive a series of phone solicitation calls from Earthlink. They came quite frequently, and all with the same message: we have something wonderful for you, a new ulltra high speed DSL connection and telephone service through the VOIP system.
I was initially skeptical. You see, I am a business journalist and I've spent a number of years writing about technology. And I knew the part of Oakland, California where I live is a former industrial neighborhood, and suspected the existing infrastructure was not up to contemporary standards.
I was assured repeatedly by one Earthlink salesperson after another that oh yes, there would be no problem, you could provide me with this service, and of course there would be no ``last mile'' problem as far as connectivity is concerned. Earthlink had already scoped it out, they said.
So finally I signed up. And my life went to hell. It took six weeks initially for your company to get service started, and that required three separate modems, two service calls by your contracted Covad technicians, and I cannot being to tell you how many hours I spent on hold, waiting to talk to your tech support people and having to listen to the Pachelbel Canon, which once was a piece of music I liked very much. But after listening to three solid hours of it at a time while on musical hold, the composition began to lose its charms. I have been on hold so long with your company's tech support that the batteries in both my cordless phone and my cell phone have been used up, if you can imagine.
I'd run through all the drills, plugging and unplugging, rebooting and resetting parameters, plugging in my computer, telephone line and Ethernet cable in varying combinations, all at the response of your tech support people in Bangalore or wherever else in the developing world you've moved all your technical support.
Eventually I did get connected, but never at the blazing speed that was promised. And I'd frequently lose connectivity, and have to start the whole rigamarole again. Each time I lost connectivity, it seemed like to took longer and longer for Earthlink to respond to my concerns and get me back online.
Now I've read Thomas Friedman's ``The World is Flat,'' and I understand the economics of offshoring tech support, but I have to tell you that your while most of your overseas tech support people are probably skilled at reading and writing English, most of them -- even the ones with the fake American names like ``Kevin'' -- are almost totally unintelligible on the phone. They're nice enough people, but they are just not skilled enough in conversational English to do the job you ask them to do. But in many ways, that's the least part of the problem.
Well, enough of past history: Let's talk about the here and now. For three weels I've had virtually zero connectivity. You've sent out a Covad technician and he told me what the other Covad technicians have told me: that my house is too far from the central office EVER to deliver the connection speed for which I have been paying for many months. That it is impossible to provide me with that service.
The most recent Covad technician told me my modem was no good, and that neither was my telephone wiring. I contacted an independent telecom contractor and had my telephone wiring upgraded to category 5E datawire. It cost me nearly $500, all told. I was also forced to pay for another one of the modems your company provides even though I didn't do anything to break the old one. It was suppose to come overnight, by the way, and it took more than 10 days to arrive. I guess that's overnight in Earthlink terms.
For much of the past three weeks, I have also had no telephone service, only a huge roar of static instead of a dial tone. Now I have a dial tone, but the signal is so weak that it fades in and out and, unfortunately, often after I have waited on hold for more than an hour to talk to one of your tech-support engineers, the line disconnects.
Every day for the past 10 days I have spent at least an hour in your online chat room with various tech support people, AND up to an hour waiting on hold to talk to your tech support engineers. They've had me run every drill, connecting, disconnecting, booting up, resetting parameters, ``pinging,'' going to the DOS commands etc etc. And nothing is working.
I did manage to have three days of having all four lights on my DSL modem lit. But then that failed and here I am again, working in the public library.
Let me explain the harsh facts of my life to you. I work for a business news service. It is in the nature of my job that I need to be online virtually my entire work day. And I have to tell you that the public library is not a very professional setting for my work. Plus, I can't make phone calls from here to do my interviews, and the library doesn't necessarily keep my work hours. Right now I am sitting in the midst of a bunch of fourth graders who are working hard at not doing their homework, for example.
If I do not work, I do not get paid. I cannot take a day off from work to stay home unconnected for yet another service call from Covad. And frankly, I don't think the Covad guy can do anything anyway. I think the problem is that Earthlink is incapable of delivering me a stable strong and fast connection. And what's more, I think the technical side of Earthlink operations has known this all along, although somehow this reality has eluded your sales force. They keep selling this service as the greatest innovation in communications history. Trust me, it isn't so.
I've been reading about how your company has been buying up other Internet service providers' dial-up customers and it's made me think that Earthlink is now going after only the low-hanging fruit and no longer wants to deal with its broadband customers. I get the distinct impression that you have let your service deteriorate in hopes we broadband customers will all go away.
Today I looked at your company's home page, and I happened to notice Earthlink's mission statement: ``Anytime, anywhere, EarthLink connects people to the power and possibilities of the Internet. We deliver a reliable and personalized experience our customers trust.'' and then I saw this line that is supposed to be Earthlink's purpose: ``To improve people's lives by giving them the ability to communicate better than ever before.''
Well, this has not been my experience. I think I could communicate better with two tin cans and a string. Frankly, I feel defrauded, used and abused by your company. If you go back through the log of my encounters with your tech support people over the past three weeks, you will sense some of my frustration.
So I leave you with two questions. The first one is what in the world is the matter with your company that you have let your service deteriorate to this point? And the second is what are you going to do for me to compensate me for these years of poor to nonexistent service for which I have been paying? I am really beyond tired of the canned apologies every poor Sarita and Sanjay has to read to me from some laminated card at your tech support call center in Bangalore or wherever.
I don't want obsequious apologies. I don't want to hear what a valued customer I am. Clearly you don't think I'm a valued customer, but simply treat me as a cash cow. This situation is intolerable and I am ready to fire your company.
I am sending you this letter by both email and snail mail and am also posting it on my blog. Barring having the Goodyear blimp hover over Earthlink headquarters and dropping flyers all over the parking lot, I don't know what else I can do to get your attention and to get this mess fixed. I am also sending a copy of this letter to the California Department of Consumer Affairs.
So what are you going to do for me? How are you going to make good this intolerable situation? I eagerly await your response. I guess you better send it in person as who knows when I will be able to be connected again?
cc: Department of Consumer Affairs
Consumer Information Division
1625 North Market Blvd., Suite N 112
Sacramento, CA 95834
earthlink ISP Internet internet-service-provider DSL VOIP connectivity, fraud incompetence offshore technical-support customer-service telephone-service telephone consumer-affairs
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