SFist Rants: We hate you SBC.
Even though we can just about see the soon-to-be-renamed SBC park from our appartment and despite the fact we live less only 2 miles from downtown San Francisco, we are no longer able to get DSL in our flat. Unbelievable! How can this be true, you are thinking. Isn't San Francisco a city that prides itself on being at the forefront of internet technology? Isn't San Francisco a city where companies are fighting to offer free wi fi for all? How, then, can you be subscribing to a perfectly acceptable DSL service one minute, and then find out your provider has decided to cancel it the next?
We will show you how, after the jump...
For the last few months we were having internet problems making it very difficult to blog. We even resorted, on occasion, to driving to work with a laptop open in the passenger seat looking for free wifi spots from where to connect and publish our posts. (The traffic lights at Seventh and Folsom came up trumps every time).
We were originally getting the DSL in our landlord's name because he had already had a contract at our address that he needed to use up. It wasn't the fastest DSL ever, but it was just fine. We were wondering whether it would be easier to keep the connection in his name or change the account to ours. Both we and the landlord spent what seemed like hours on the phone to SBC who persuaded us that to change the account would be easy as anything, if we agreed to keep the same number and so we signed up.
As soon as they switched the account to our name, we could no longer get the DSL signal at all, so we called SBC to find out why. They then sprang on us the news that they would no longer provide DSL at our address and the only reason they had been providing it to our landlord previously, was because he had signed his contract before they made the decision to the stop the service. Of course they didn't warn us about this when we were discussing with them whether or not to switch the account to our name.
In layman's terms, SBC have distance limitations for their DSL customers. If the customers are more than a certain distance away from the hub, then DSL cannot be provided. For 6 months we had a perfectly acceptable DSL connection. But then SBC decided the quality of the service they were providing to the people on the furthest stretches away from the hub was not acceptable. So,without even asking us whether or not we were satisfied what did they do? They shrunk the distance at which they would provide internet access. As we were in the outer area, we therefore got our DSL connection cancelled. Oh yeah, oh great.
Unfortunately we have no cable in our block. It is an industrial area and they don't deliver. We tried Covad, they couldn't do it either because they use SBC's line. SBC told us we could have dial up instead. Woopeedoo! Hang on a minute - they cancel our perfectly reasonable DSL because it is "not good enough", and then offer us dial up instead, and they claim the decision was made in the first place because they were worried about customer satisfaction? Their bad version of DSL was a zillion times better than dial up, but they now force us to have no other choice. Have they ever tried blogging on dial up???? Talk about a return to the dark ages.
We ranted and raved ever so politely at their customer service representative who understood our situation but couldn't do anything about it because the "decision came from somewhere above". We asked to speak to her manager. We wanted to let SBC know how crazy their decision-making looks from our point of view. She said she would ask him to call us back, but of course he never did.
Eventually we found an expensive solution to our problem, no thanks to SBC, but you are just going to have to wait for a future rave to find out about that little beauty.