ryan kennedy’s blog

I’ve been with Speakeasy since February, 2004. They’ve provided good DSL and fantastic support. Calling them at midnight on a weekday, you probably wouldn’t expect to have a human on the line running you through some diagnostics and getting you back up and running. Even better, the tech on the other end of the line could generally figure out if you were a dork or a newb and handle things accordingly. Once they figured out I’d done some networking before, they stopped asking me, “press the ‘Start’ key, click on ‘Run’ and type in ‘cmd’” and started asking “can you ping this host?” And, honestly, you couldn’t beat the terms of service. Run a server at home if you want, even their least expensive packages came with at least one static IP address. So if I enjoy it so much, why am I saying goodbye?

I moved about 2 weeks ago and last week got the ball rolling to get my DSL migrated from San Carlos to Santa Clara. I’d done this before, migrating my service from Folsom down to San Carlos. It was incredibly painless and they finished the migration faster than they initially said they would. This time, however, things were different. I went to their online support form and started a request to get things migrated. After a day or two, I got a response from someone indicating that they couldn’t confirm that I can get service at my new phone number and address. I told them it was probably because the house is brand new. They told me to call the sales department. In the meantime, I asked if they could at least stop service at the apartment in San Carlos so I could shut off the phone line there. They didn’t respond.

Today, I called Speakeasy to get in touch with a sales person. I had to do this when I set up service in Folsom too. My house there was brand new and they had to do a few extra checks to make sure the address existed and could, indeed, get DSL. When I called today, I gave the sales person my new phone number and address. He keyed it into the system and told me the same thing as the online tech: he couldn’t confirm that they could get me service. Evidently AT&T’s system was “kicking him out”. He said it might be the result of the phone number’s former life, whatever it may have been. He gave me two options, I could either wait another week and see if the phone line freed up (unlikely since the phone line had already been mine for the past month) or I could take my service elsewhere (if a friend tells you to sign up for AT&T DSL, are they really your friend?).

And that’s when it happened. All allegiance I had to Speakeasy died in that very sentence. The company that had previously provided fantastic, over the top support gave up on me. When I told him I’d just cancel the service, he didn’t try to stop me. He didn’t offer to call AT&T to see if the issue could be sorted out. He didn’t offer a number I could call with AT&T so I could sort it out myself. He didn’t offer anything. Well, that’s not true. He did offer to transfer me to the people that handled disconnects.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 10th, 2007 at 8:31 am and is filed under Unfiled. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.