As the cable modem story distributed yesterday and the dsl story below
demonstrate, we are still in the early adopter stage of broadband.  Yes,
it works magnificently for some people and others have continual problems
that are unexplained.  There are still some issues that have to be sorted
out before it works flawlessly for the average user.

kelly

Chicago Tribune

   [INLINE] DSL DELIVERS HIGH-SPEED HEADACHES
   MISHAPS LITTER ROAD TO FAST INTERNET ACCESS
   By Katie Hafner
   New York Times News Service
   May 15, 2000

   Jonathan Teller resorted to an appeal to the chairman of the phone
   company. Bill Hipps sent letters to his local newspaper. For weeks
   James Williams couldn't figure out why he was dropped at precisely the
   same time every night.

   They are strangers to one another, living different lives thousands of
   miles apart. Yet they have the same problem: All were thwarted in
   their attempts to establish and maintain DSL service in their homes.

   While getting a phone company to fill an order and install DSL may
   seem to be a major hurdle, their real nightmare began after the
   installation, with problems ranging from misconfigured software to
   widespread service outages.

   DSL, which stands for digital subscriber line, is a form of high-speed
   Internet connection that is becoming as familiar a term to the on-line
   world as http. By the end of this year, said Fritz McCormick, an
   analyst at the Yankee Group, there will be 900,000 DSL subscribers in
   the United States and more than double that number by the end of 2001.

   But DSL, as a new technology, is bound to have unexpected hiccups. Add
   to that the huge demand for the service, mix in a lot of competitive
   fervor on the part of the local phone companies and dozens of other
   DSL providers, and you have a recipe for a genuine mess.

   High-speed Internet connections via cable modems, which currently
   outsell DSL, have their share of problems too. But many of the
   complaints about cable modems focus on the slowdowns that occur when
   the connection is shared by multiple customers.

   The beauty of DSL is that it delivers fast Web connections to homes
   and small businesses over ordinary telephone lines. DSL users can make
   or receive calls on the same lines used to connect to the Internet.

   One customer whose patience wore thin is Hipps. "My take on the whole
   situation is probably that the DSL industry is growing too fast," he
   said, "and that the technology hasn't been tested enough with all the
   volume and variables."

   For nearly nine months, Hipps, a software developer in Salt Lake City,
   has had DSL service from U S West.net. Half the time he has had
   "really great service," he said, and the rest of the time he has been
   unable to get a connection. At one point, he said, his service was
   down for a month, and none of the dozens of customer service
   representatives he spoke with could help.

   Hipps had all but given up. When he wanted a reliable connection, he
   went back to his old dial-up connection. It was slow, 56 kilobits per
   second, but not nearly so fickle.

   Hipps likened his predicament to being in an abusive relationship.
   "When I could get on my computer, and things were working properly, it
   was great, it was fast," he said. "But you never knew if that guy was
   going to come home drunk and slap you around a little bit. You never
   knew what to expect when you sat down to the computer."

   As it turned out, the problem lay with a computer at U S West.net. The
   problem was fixed, and for now at least, Hipps is a happy customer.
   "I'm kind of waiting for the other shoe to drop," he said. "It won't
   surprise me if I turn on my computer and it doesn't work again."

   To be sure, for every dissatisfied customer around the country, there
   are many others who couldn't be happier with DSL. "The vast majority
   of our customers are just thrilled with it," said Mike McLeland, vice
   president of operations at SBC Advanced Solutions, a subsidiary of SBC
   Communications, a regional phone company that provides DSL service in
   Illinois and 12 other states. McLeland is downright sanguine about the
   situation. "Managing growth is a great problem to have," he said.

   SBC has promised to make DSL available to 80 percent of its telephone
   customers by the end of 2002 through an accelerated $6 billion effort
   called Project Pronto. The company already has 201,000 subscribers
   with service up and running.

   Further, McLeland said, SBC is "well down the path" in achieving what
   the phone industry calls the "five 9's" network: DSL service that is
   up and running 99.999 percent of the time. Bell Atlantic said it had
   its service up about 99.5 percent of the time.

   But Teller, an Internet consultant in New York, has trouble believing
   those numbers. One day late in April his service went down, and no
   amount of tinkering with his computer's settings could bring the
   connection back.

   After days of calling customer support in vain, Teller sent a letter
   via Federal Express to Bell Atlantic's chairman, Ivan Seidenberg. He
   got a phone call from someone on the company's presidential appeals
   team, who conferred an elevated status to his "trouble ticket." When
   he called customer support after that, Teller said, "a supervisor
   would say, `Oh, wow, you have a presidential appeals ticket."' But in
   the end, big whoop. "They'd be really impressed, but it wouldn't get
   me anywhere."

   Seventeen days and countless telephone calls after his service went
   out, Teller said, he received a call from a Bell Atlantic networking
   expert, perhaps the one remaining person at the company he had not yet
   spoken with.

   "He hung up, then called back a few minutes later and said, `Try it
   now,"' Teller recalled. The connection was back. As it turned out, the
   company had upgraded some hardware, and the settings on his account
   needed a simple tweak.

   Teller has since switched service providers, to a company called ACE
   DSL, but he had trouble getting Bell Atlantic to process his request.

   When they hear stories like Teller's, Bell Atlantic officials
   acknowledge their unhappiness with the current quality of service. "We
   are absolutely not satisfied," said Myles Mendelsohn, vice president
   and general manager of Bell Atlantic Internet Solutions, the Internet
   service provider for Bell Atlantic. "Bell Atlantic is addressing it as
   aggressively as they can." The company has added 600 people to its
   maintenance, technical support and sales force and has "teams working
   around the clock to address issues that impact customers," said Joan
   Rasmussen, a Bell Atlantic spokeswoman.

   The greatest source of annoyance is the level of customer support or,
   as many companies now label it, customer care.

   Phone companies and other DSL service providers need hundreds of
   customer service representatives to handle the flood of inquiries and
   service requests, so they are retraining and hiring workers. Along
   with the shortage of trained personnel has come a lack of efficiency
   and, some say, a lack of competence.

   Some frustrated DSL subscribers have even taken to logging the number
   of fruitless hours they spend on the phone with customer support
   employees.

   Hipps said he had racked up 65 hours, acquainting himself with every
   aspect of U S West's customer support hierarchy.

   Williams, a police officer in Philadelphia, is all too familiar with
   Bell Atlantic's customer support. Williams said he had encountered
   three serious problems since he first got his DSL service three months
   ago. With each problem, he said, he talked to a minimum of five
   people.

   In the process, Williams became something of a DSL expert. He tosses
   around DSL jargon as if he invented it. Terms like DSLAM (digital
   subscriber line access multiplexer, the equipment that sends data into
   a bigger data pipe), CO (central office, the place where the switching
   equipment resides) and throughput (transmission speed) trip off his
   tongue.

   But Williams, who prefers to do his Web surfing before dawn, would
   gladly have traded all that knowledge for a cure for his strangest
   problem. At least twice a week at 4:30 "on the dot," he said, his
   service went down. "I took that as my cue to go to bed," he said.
   Williams was assured that the service was not being taken down for
   routine maintenance. The problem has been fixed, but its cause remains
   a mystery.


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