Review by goalieskates 
Posted: 1.6 years ago
member for 3.8 years, 948 visits, last login: a few hours ago
 Knoxville,Knox,TN
 $46 per month
 BellSouth
 "Works - most of the time, anyway"
 "Fragmented customer service, poor communication"
 "Giving it up"
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I originally chose BellSouth DSL as an alternative when my previous provider, Earthlink, couldn't get to the bottom of a connection issue I was having. At the time, their DSL service worked fine in the daytime, and died at night. Through reading here on Broadband Reports, I came to the conclusion that there must be some sort of line interference causing the problem.
Earthlink proved non-responsive so I moved to BellSouth. We already had telephone service with them, and I was counting on their ability to provide service. Sure enough, they lived up to my hopes, installed a filter, and my DSL problems were solved.
I have to admit I was a pretty happy camper for the next five years or so, until intermittant problems began to appear. I work as software support so I have expectations of what that means. I also do freelance photography work on the side and have a couple of out of state photographer friends I regularly email. I began to notice that emails from one photographer wouldn't come through until hours or days later - after the other photographer had responded. So I knew the email was out there - somewhere - and I just hadn't received it. This led me to start taking a closer look at what was happening with Bell South and trying to get to the bottom of things.
Long story short, while the technical side of Bell South may be decent enough, the customer service side is a chamber of horrors. You have to know which department is the correct department, or a CSR is perfectly capable of telling you problems are "your fault". (more than once) If you deal with customer support via email using the form on the Bell South website, the phone customer support tells you it is "your fault" no solution has been reached. Meanwhile I was shunted from department to department until I finally guessed the right questions to ask, picking up nuggets of how they work along the way.
In desperation I asked if there wasn't a customer service representative (like a level 2) who could answer all my questions without all the transfers. I was flatly told no, there wasn't: Bell South runs different departments with different computer systems in different locations. I really didn't want to know all this - I simply wanted answers to what I thought were simple questions.
As long as Bell South works for you, it is a decent enough provider. But when you start having problems, the support simply isn't there or is too fragmented to mean much. Needless to say, I'm in the process of moving to another provider, and to add insult to injury, saving substantial money in the process. Live and learn.
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