Borklog: One entry


21 January 2003

Folks who hang around me know I gripe about my ISP, Alltel. All the infobots around me know alltel too:
[10:54] markd2 alltel?
[10:54] monkeybot alltel are a bunch of wankers
I have their ISDN serivce currently because the dial-up services is really bad, due to the local infrastructure being old. (2-3 disconnects on a good day, dozens of disconnects a day if it rains hard). We're 1000 feet too far for DSL, and the cable modem folks just laugh at us when we call up. So ISDN is the next best thing. Two years ago they ran some lines and got us hooked up. Aside from being a king's ranson every month, it's been a usable service. In September it started flaking out. After months of complaints (I have a 50Kemail paper trail) things have finally come to a head.

The problem is that when we call the local (Apollo, PA) ISDN dial up number, sometimes it chooses not to pass packets. Usually this happens at 3 in the morning when the "help" desk is closed. Other times it just decides to drop half of the connection, forcing a re-dial and setting up all my net sessions again. The next closest number is in Delmont, PA, and is very reliable, and is faster than the Apollo number.

We had some stuff to do in December that had to get done, so we used the Delmont number for a week. Turns out that is worth about $450 in long distance. After calling and complaining to the billing office (and getting the Delmont charges taken off the bill), they're finally starting to look at the problem. The local folks were kind of surprised having never head of the problem. I guess the 4-5 months of complaining to the support folks never made it anywhere. I'm not terribly surprised that it takes a big(ish) monetary impact before any kind of decent customer service happens.


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