[David Strom's Web Informant] 6 June 2010: Strom's cable Internet odyssey

[David Strom]

Web Informant 16 June 2010: Strom's cable Internet odyssey

How many cable guys does it take to provide me with Internet service?
It sounds like the beginning of a "lightbulb" joke, but this question
is pretty real for me. Turns out to be somewhere north of a dozen.

I moved into my new office two weeks ago, but it took until yesterday
to get the Internet turned on there. Turns out a combination of
factors, aided by some bizarre complications from Charter, my cable
supplier, caused the delay.

At the center of my difficulties was my office was using a new street
address that wasn't in anyone's database – including the Post Office.
It took numerous phone calls to find the right person in the City of
St. Louis – not exactly your best example of efficient government
under most circumstances – before that was fixed. I think. The PO
updated their database, but it took a couple of weeks before I could
go in to usps.com and see it for myself. Why? Because speedy delivery
of Web data isn't in the PO's motto.

It is amazing to me that we have such poor Internet delivery in 2010.
Back when broadband meant getting 56k ISDN, the phone companies ruled
the roost. You could get T1s for thousands of dollars, but you could
get them just about anywhere you could string a twisted pair of copper
wires. Now the USA is well down on the list of countries that have
lots of broadband available to their citizens – indeed, China has more
Internet users than we have total population now. And Singapore is
putting megabit connectivity everywhere. What happened?

Part of the problem is that we have the absolutely worst
communications customer service entities to deal with. They answer the
call with "we want to provide you with superior service today" and
apologize when they don't deliver, but they never take ownership of
the customer. They can't marshal the field resources to find and fix
problems in their wiring plant. And for communications companies, I
was amazed at how often my call was dropped after being on hold for
many minutes. Come on, people, this isn't rocket science. (And given
the state of NASA, I am not sure that is a good comparison either.)

Having cable and phone companies compete for Internet access hasn't
helped the customer either. I tried to order just a regular land line
from AT&T (who is my local phone supplier here) but was told
repeatedly that my address wasn't in their database. Back to the PO
problem. When the AT&T technician coincidentally showed up at my
office yesterday, he claimed he couldn't give me service because I
ordered my phone using a nearby address. Yet after spending an hour on
the phone with his supervisors, he managed to deliver dial tone to my
office. Thanks, Roger, I appreciate that tenacity. But why tell me you
can't do it and then you can?

Meanwhile, Charter took several visits with an ever-changing cast of
characters. One time I got the guy that actually laid the cable along
the street and in my condo development – he brought a map showing
where the lines went. While that was encouraging, trouble was, one of
them wasn't connected properly. That brought out another guy who
hooked up one of my missing links. Then another woman came (who was
the most entertaining tech among my crew) and told me that I was
missing a "tap". That took someone else to install the tap. Why
couldn't she install it herself? What, they have a tap specialist?
Someone else needed to find the right person with a key to open the
box that the tap went in. I am not making this stuff up. Then I
finally had two guys yesterday that actually had to locate my line and
hook things up. At least they came with the key.

All throughout this process, I Tweeted and called various Charter
people, trying to plead my case. At one point, I actually tried the
live chat feature on their Web site, but that was agonizingly slow and
like talking to a six-year old child. There was one woman in their
call center in South Carolina, she did take some ownership of my
problem but didn't seem completely in touch with the crew on the
grounds around my office.

It shouldn't be this hard. If we are going to become a first-world
Internet country, we need better broadband suppliers who can take
customer service to new highs, not new lows.

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