Oh Earthlink!

OK, so here it is Christmas Eve, and I've spent the day in the Alameda Free Library hitchhiking on their free wireless Internet access, for which I am very grateful, by the way.

Except that I am paying Earthlink $86.58 per month for these services,  which they can't seem to provide. I have not had a stable connection since November 21, and for the greatest part of the past month, have had no connection at all. This is despite my paying for the installation of category 5 dataline,  paying Earthlink another $79 for a new modem I probably didn't need, and spending at least an hour a day talking to Earthlink's outsourced tech support people.

I wish just once they'd give me a straight answer about what's wrong. Everything went to hell in November and, despite my doing everything Earthlink's asked me to do, nothing seems to work.

Because I work for the very big media company, I've had occasion to read Earthlink's finanical statements. The most recent 10Q filing Earthlink (ELNK) made with the Securities and Exchange Commission was very interesting. The company told the SEC that one of the really good things about having ``tenured''  base of subscribers is that they need less tech support. The company has pared itself down to this so-called  tenured  base, and then bought up a whole bunch of dial-up customers from other ISPs who wanted to get out of that segment of the business.

The company's completely outsourced tech support and thinks it's a marvelous cost-cutting technique, according to the SEC filing. It's also gotten out of some business ventures that involved providing free municipal wireless access in some parts of the country.

So it's lean and mean. But gee, you'd think in today's economy, Earthlink would be doing what it could to make its customers happy, wouldn't you? In fact, Earthlink said in this particular document--filed with the SEC October 31-- that ``we believe that focusing on the customer relationship will increase loyalty and reduce churn.'' Well here I am a longstanding Earthlink customer, and I don't feel that Earthlink has focused one iota of attention on solving this connectivity problem.

I think I have to fire Earthlink because I cannot do my job with such horrible and unreliable Internet connections. So now I'm looking for another ISP that can provide me with stable DSL and VoIP services.  Unfortunately AT&T can't provide the service in my part of Oakland, Verizon tells me that my home address doesn't exist and Comcast also says it doesn't provide DSL service in this neighborhood.

Hey folks, I am not in the backwaters of civilization here. This is Oakland, California.  If I were to climb up on my roof, I could see Silicon Valley from here. There are high-tech businesses all around me, plus an airport and a major university, and I have two Starbucks within easy walking distance.  So what's the deal?  Do I live in the Bermuda Triangle of DSL service?  I walk outside and can see the telephone poles. We have paved streets, sidewalks and drive around in vehicles with internal combustion engines. What in the world is wrong? I am seriously searching for answers.

By some amazing miracle I actually got online for a few minutes tonight. I checked the bandwidth meter on the CNET site and found that I am presently connected at the not-very-blazing speed of 202.9 kbps, which is barely a cut above dial-up speed.

And the signal has dropped off three times in just the few minutes I've been writing this.

I most of the time don't have a phone connection either. Think of Hokusai's ``Great Wave off Kanagawa'' and you'll have a pretty good idea of what the static on my phone line sounds like. That's what I often get instead of a dial tone.

I don't need to play computer games and I'm not interested in downloading great amounts of music or movies. I just want to be able to use my computer: to send and receive email and to load web pages in a reasonable amount of time. Is this asking too much from the technology we find here  on the cusp of 2009? 

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