Last night I got home and found a message on my machine from Earthlink that said I should call them. This was 48 hours after I was told I would hear from them in 24 hours. I called to find out what progress they had made or what problem they found.
Instead I was connected to a guy who decided to test my line again, from India, and who told me my speed looked fine. This is after I went through all these speed tests on Sunday, with a different guy. This new guy asked me to run a speed test on my side again just to make sure. I went to the speakeasy speed test site but got quickly exasperated when the test page stalled half rendered because of my slow speed. I told the guy this was ridiculous, that my service is so poor the speed test won’t even come up and how can he seriously tell me that my speed is OK.
He said he’d escalate this to local support and I asked why that wasn’t done Sunday when we had established there was a problem. He reiterated that he’d escalate this to local support. I asked for the number of local support so I can make sure they don’t just sit on the escalation for another 48 hours. He explained that he can’t give me their number, that they would do the work and then report back to Earthlink and then Earthlink would report back to me.
I asked, then, when can I expect a response. He said 4 hours. Then he said, but we close in 2 hours, so call back at 11 or 12 tomorrow (my time). So that’s more than 12 hours.
I hung up but I was still angry that I had been waiting patiently for a response for 48 hours while they did nothing. So I called back and told them I didn’t want to pay for the 2 days during which they neither delivered the proper service nor worked on the problem. The woman I talked to told me that, at the rate I was paying, that would only come to about $5.00. I told them to do it anyway. I then complained that I wanted something done to assure that this problem would be worked on tomorrow and wouldn’t just sit is a queue for several more days. She transfered me to someone else and a friendly recorded voice informed me that the wait time would be about 33 minutes. I hung up and went to bed.
In the morning I checked out a couple sites and they seemed to come up fine. I then ran a speed test and got just a hair under 5Mbps. Ahhhhh…. it was like being able to breath again.
I still don’t know what the problem was or whether Earthlink (actually probably Covad at this point) fixed it or did a squirrel family that had been gnawing on a cable somewhere move on to gnaw on something else?
I’ve generally not had problems with Earthlink’s (or Covad’s) service but I don’t want to praise them just for doing what I pay them to do, which is deliver problem free dsl, and I haven’t decided yet whether to pursue this further and find out whether they fixed a problem or did the problem just mysteriously stop on it’s own with the danger of returning again just as mysteriously.
Now I’ve got to go through the headache of reconfiguring my system for use with the router to get all my PC’s back online.