Surfers Share Gripes About AT&T Broadband

AT&T's switch of its AT&T Broadband Internet cable subscribers from the Excite@Home network to AT&T's own cable Internet service has been less than satisfactory for thousands of users who have been hit by service outages and slow connections.

AT&T Broadband said on Thursday that less than 10,000 people remained temporarily disconnected from broadband Internet service, cut off when bankrupt Excite@Home terminated its service December 1. AT&T Broadband transferred disconnected customers to its own Internet service network, completing most of the work by Friday of last week.

In addition to those 10,000 people, AT&T Broadband estimates that another 25,000 additional customers--about 3 percent of the more than 850,000 AT&T Broadband customers using the Excite@Home network--have been unable to get online due to problems these subscribers are having downloading the right configuration files needed to set up their cable modem, says Sara Eder, a spokesperson for AT&T Broadband.

"We built a network very quickly, and there are bound to be a few hiccups here and there," she says.

She complains that too much attention is being put on the relatively small percentage of customers having trouble rather than on the ability of the company to manage the massive network migration in under a week.

Slower Speeds?

Still, customers in some parts of the country continue to complain about intermittent service and slow download speeds.

Customers moved to the new AT&T Broadband network are spread out across several states, in Oregon, Washington, Texas, California, Illinois, Colorado, Utah, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Connecticut. The consumer protection departments of several of these states have received complaints related to the move, including intermittent connections, slow speeds, and trouble receiving prompt customer service.

The attorney general's office of Connecticut sent AT&T Broadband a letter on Wednesday, asking the company to describe what representations have been made in the media about the speed and availability of AT&T Broadband's service as part of an investigation of the company under the state's Unfair Trade Practices law.

The office also asked for the number of new cable Internet subscribers AT&T Broadband added in Connecticut since Excite@Home shut down service and whether AT&T Broadband considers the service disruptions proper grounds for customers to terminate their cable modem rental agreements and service contracts.

Consumers are concerned about being stuck with a pricey modem that typically costs over $200 and no Internet access with it, says Richard E. Maloney, director of trade practices for the Connecticut Department of Consumer Protection. "Often what the consumers need and want is the correct information. Let's see if that was out there for them," he says.

"Customers are welcome to make complaints to the attorney general," AT&T Broadband's Eder says, noting that the company had sent four letters to customers nationwide about the outage and was drafting another. "AT&T is confident to stand by [its] actions."

The Connecticut attorney general's 17-point letter also asks AT&T Broadband to describe its procedure for compensating customers for lost service and its timetable for restoring high-speed service to all subscribers.

Downgrading Download Speeds

The attorney general is also looking into AT&T Broadband's decision to cap its maximum download speed at 1.5 megabits per second, about half of what Excite@Home customers enjoyed. AT&T Broadband's bandwidth cap--charging customers the same price for slower service--raises a new issue for the attorney general's office, Maloney says. "It could bring up an unfair trade practice, and that would be the scope of our investigation. What are the promises these companies have made?"

Customers in the Sacramento, California area were connected to AT&T Broadband's Internet service within days of the outage, but until Wednesday afternoon some users in this city were complaining of slow connections on a bulletin board run by DSLreports.com, a consumer gripe site run by Silver Matrix.

Jim Hall, one Sacramento AT&T Broadband subscriber, clocked and logged his download speeds over a few days frequently at under 50 kilobits per second-- less than the speed of a regular 56-kbps dial-up connection. AT&T Broadband's initial switch over made "a nice connection turn into one of absolute hell," Hall says.

Speeds increased for Hall on Thursday to near the 1.5 mbps cap AT&T Broadband promised. However, that is still far below the 3 mbps that Hall received under Excite@Home, Hall says.

As a beta tester for Microsoft, Hall often has to download very large files--upwards of 400MB or more. And Hall frequents technical newsgroups to keep up with his work. Web surfing hasn't really changed noticeably for him, but the download speed is a real issue.

"I spend a good three hours a day just keeping up with what I have to keep up with ... but it was just like I walked into a different world without that connection," he says.

Hall is also upset about AT&T Broadband's public posture during the switch, he says. "They wanted some good publicity for getting everyone back online quickly, and they did that" but at the expense of some subscribers, he said.

Hall wants AT&T Broadband's offer of two days of free service for each day of service interruption to apply to substandard services like he had been receiving, he says.

Customer Service Concerns

Other users voiced similar complaints.

After a combined six hours of waiting on hold over the course of a week for the right customer service representative, Randy Phillips of Alameda, California was told Wednesday evening that the reason his cable Internet connection had been blinking on and off was a misconfigured router, and that service technicians were fixing the problem. By Wednesday evening the problem had apparently been resolved, he says, but he still wants to be compensated for the erratic service. He feels cheated by the prospect of paying full price for the intermittent service he had to put up with for a week.

"The thing that burns me is that AT&T is telling everyone that everything is hunky-dory when it's not," he says. "I feel for the poor schmuck that doesn't know what an IP address is," he says. Less technically literate users might have had significant trouble setting up service, he said. The individual problems faced by customers aren't accounted for by AT&T Broadband's offer of two days free for every day without service. "Once they light up an area like Alameda, then everyone in the area is considered up, and the offer ends."

AT&T Broadband will consider requests for additional free service credits on a case-by-case basis, Eder says.

"The two days of credit for one day of outage is good compensation," she says, noting that the problems in California and other areas were related to the differences between the network configuration of Excite@Home and AT&T Broadband. "This is a temporary problem, and we apologize for the temporary inconvenience."

She asserts that technicians had addressed network configuration problems on Saturday and Sunday night, however, and that the company's specialists were working on whatever network problems remained.