Review by houblues 
UPDATED: 1 year ago
member for 4.9 years, 190 visits, last login: 9 days ago
 Houston,Harris,TX
 $36 per month
 "They aren't ComCast, and they apologize profusely"
 "Apologies mean little when your service is down"
 "Houston needs a real broadband provider!"
| Pre Sales information:
Install Co-ordination:
Connection reliability:
Tech Support:
Services:
Value for money:
(ratings match consensus)
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After being drug through a knothole backwards with the Comcast experience, I bit the bullet and went with AT&T for phone and internet in March ‘08, thinking that at least the customer service could not be remotely as bad as Comcast.
And for the last 8 months the service was pretty decent, didn’t have much , if anything, to complain about. Then 5 days ago, Thursday, the phone went dead. I checked my electronic bill payment and was up to date. Called Tech Support, and to make a long story short, went around and around between departments for an hour before finding that my phone did not have a technical problem, it had been cut off deliberately. By AT&T. For no reason.
Well, maybe a reason. The best guess was that someone else had discontinued their service, and a number got transposed, meaning my service got dropped. I was pissed, but after an hour they created a brand new account, and my service was back to normal – I thought. I was surprised that there was no error checking system to prevent someone else from canceling my service, and no offer of compensation for my inconvenience, but OK, what was over was over.
Friday night the DSL service goes down. Thirty minutes with Tech Support and they say that it will be back up Saturday morning. And it was. No mention from them on why it went down. I suspect it is somehow related to them cancelling my account, but they don’t comment either way. Saturday morning the service does indeed work again.
During the day Saturday it is obvious the phone account has not been recreated to match the original. We are getting spam calls to our supposedly unlisted number, and call waiting, which we had deactivated previously, is in force. I call and get that straightened out.
This morning, Monday, the DSL goes out again. To make another long story short, the shutting down the phone service triggered a shutting down of the DSL, which apparently no one in my previous long chain of communications had the foresight to anticipate, much less prevent. They tell me it will take two days to restore. Two days to restore the service which I never wanted shut down! Sorry, that’s the way it is, no way to shortcut the system .
I call the retention office, the one you have to call to get someone who knows the ropes of the system. Actually, over a two hour period I talked to this office three times. Bottom line, the two day estimate for restoring is in error, it will actually take five days – three to decommission the line, two to restore it. They are oh-so-sorry, but there is no way around it. After apologizing profusely, they finally offer a $30 credit to offset my five hours total on the phone and my lost five days of service.
Followup comments:  
Wideband User
@comcast.net | want more... Short story... Are you still with AT&T? | |
|  | houblues
join:2004-12-08
Houston, TX | Re: want more... I am still with AT&T. In Houston you have no choice other than AT&T and Comcast, or someone delivering the same service under another name, which, as far as I can tell, just puts another Customer Service layer between you and the actual provider. | |
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