Review by CloaknDagr 
Posted: 5.4 years ago
member for 6.1 years, 88 visits, last login: 118 days ago
 San Pedro,Los Angeles,CA
 $49 per month (12 month contract)
 about 7 days
 SBC
CLEC party: SBC
 "Started out very good"
 "After associating with Yahoo, the service got progressively worse"
 "Unless SBC does some major improvements, avoid at all costs."
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(ratings below consensus)
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This is about business connections, I don't know anything about SBC/Yahoo home use.
I'm a small business consultant. I do everything computer related for small businesses. Generally the goal is to give them similar IT to what bigger businesses have, but scaled in cost and infrastructure for small business.
I had SBC for 3 years. The first year was great, the speeds were on the lower end but that's to be expected as I'm right on the edge for max. distance from the main switch. I was getting about 325 for downstream and that beat the heck out of dial-up. The connection was rock solid and reliable. I didn't hesitate to recommend SBC to my clients.
Sometime during the second year, SBC did this thing with Yahoo. I have nothing against Yahoo per se, I have two Yahoo POP3 accounts that I pay for to keep a constant business email address. Things started to get worse from that point on though.
SBC previously sent software with the modem kit that established the original account on site. That software would run and work on anything, even an old 486DX2 machine, and you could get an account established and let router PPPoE take over from there. THEN came the Yahoo affiliation. The software that established the account was integrated with a bunch of Yahoo crap that no one wants on their business connection but you HAD to install it to set up an account. Some clients machines didn't meet the minimum system requirements and the software refused to install. All in all it was a major pain. In business we just want a clean internet connection, all the Yahoo toolbars, adware, spyware, or whatever are not desirable.
Things went from bad to worse. When they moved their tech support to India, getting decent support became impossible. The Indian culture is considerably different than the American culture, and being "service oriented to the customer" is apparently a new concept to the Indians. Without fail, the tech support people in India would read from the scripts on their screen and ignore everything I told them. They would talk over me and not listen to me at all. I finally had to tell one woman that "If you're going to deal with American's YOU SHUT UP AND LISTEN WHEN YOUR CUSTOMER IS TALKING TO YOU!!!" Explaining that I am an IT Professional, MCSE, etc. had no impact what-so-ever, they just went right back to reading their scripts and insisting that I do things I'd already tried or checked long before I dialed tech support. VERY AGGRAVATING and very expensive for my customers and me. I bill for time, so time spent going over things I know are OK is a total waste. Obviously the tech support is geared to and locked into support for home users with little or no IT knowledge.
If I treated my clients the way this Indian tech support treats customers, I would be out of business in a month.
Things went from worse to terrible. Somewhere in the process of integrating with Yahoo, SBC changed my mail server from pop/smtp.sbcglobal.net to pop/smtp.sbcglobal.yahoo.com, but NO ONE TOLD ME ABOUT IT and I didn't get any email for two weeks. Same for customers that used similar connections to mine. THIS IS A VERY BAD THING FOR A BUSINESS CLIENT! Of course when I called tech support and found out the server had been changed, the Indians acted like I'm stupid. I couldn't get across to them that no one had notified existing accounts of the change.
Then things went from terrible to abominable. One of my clients is engaged pretty exclusively in e-commerce. That office is right next to mine, so the downstream speed was about the same. Over a period of 2 months the connection degraded to the point that a speed test on DSLReports showed a downstream connection of 14kps. That's 14!!! The connection would drop off all the time, sometimes as much as 20 times per day. Over the two month period when this was occurring both the client and myself made numerous calls to tech support. And guess who we talked to? Yes, someone in India who wanted to read us their script, talk over us and not listen to a thing we were telling them. After two months of my client not being able to conduct business on a reliable basis, we finally got some action.
The action was several visits from SBC technicians of all kinds, nothing was solved. It's not the clients computer system or wiring, it's SBC and they admitted that. The client is demanding a refund and I sincerely believe he deserves it.
I had switched to Cox HSI previous to this situation and advised the client to do the same. We get over 3000kps downstream and Cox flagged my account with a notification that I'm an IT Professional so I NEVER talk to any script readers and on the very rare occasions that I do call tech support I talk to an American in San Diego not someone with a bad accent in New Delhi. The American actually listens to me and discusses the problem/solution with me. How refreshing!
If anyone tries to sell you SBC/Yahoo, run away as fast as you can.
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