To: Kent Borg Cc: discuss@blu.org From: Laura Conrad Date: Sat, 17 May 2008 08:55:10 -0400 Subject: Re: Choice of ISP >>>>> "Kent" == Kent Borg writes: Kent> Laura Conrad wrote: >> How can that be? Mine seems to break when Verizon breaks the copper. >> Kent> OK, I'll be more explicit: Covad never seems to fall down on Kent> the job, in 5-years *they* seem do what I pay them to do. I've had two serious outages in the 7+ years I've been with speakeasy. I would agree with your characterization of the second one (early last month). I reported it on Thursday afternoon, and Verizon looked at and fixed it on Monday afternoon. This was because it was in the Verizon Central Office, and they didn't need any help from any of their customers. I consider that waiting that many days to look at a problem in an essential service is not taking customer service seriously, but I don't see anything Speakeasy/Covad could have done better or differently. However, I still take seriously the possibility of switching to Comcast, in spite of the fact that they're more expensive than Speakeasy (if you count the cost of cable TV, which I don't really want except in baseball season) for something less for my purposes than what I get from Speakeasy. And probably evil as well. This is because that's the only option in my part of the world that doesn't make your broadband access dependant on the Verizon copper (I don't think we have FIOS here yet). The previous outage, about 3 years ago, was a week and a half, and it was definitely worse because instead of just dealing with Verizon (difficult to impossible), I had to talk to Speakeasy, which talked to Covad, which talked to Verizon. None of these people had any idea how to deal with the physical setup in my neighborhood, where the copper goes to the phone closet in my neighbor's basement, to which I can get a key, but I need to know in advance when I need it, and then to my apartment. I believe that it turned out that the problem was on the street, but to diagnose it they needed the basement. At the time I wrote an angry blog post which includes the log of what Speakeasy and Covad were doing. My site host is down, but here's a text version of the original html (if this mailman list is configured to deliver text attachments): --=-=-= Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=verizon.txt DSL Outage finally over My [1]Speakeasy DSL line went down sometime during the day of Sunday, May 1. It finally came back up at about 2 PM on Monday, May 8. It was a little bit hard to get sympathy from people once they realized that my phone was working and I had a dialup line for internet access. But really, a lot of things I do depend on having my not only the high speed, but the static IP address. Here's the list I emailed a friend on wednesday of the horrible week: 1. I can't email anyone whose ISP rejects mail from servers with dynamic IP addresses (which includes my sister), 2. the mailing lists that live on my machine don't work for anyone but me, and they don't work very well for me because of (1). 3. The script that updates my website doesn't work because rsync expects something it doesn't have. 4. Nobody who usually gets music off my home computer (which would be more people than usual because of (3) can get at it, and I have to email them. 5. And all my browsing has to be over this dialup, which is ok for lots of things, but one of the things I should be doing is finding pictures for the covers of my books, and that's really slow. Why so long to fix DSL runs on the same technology as the telephone system, so you would expect it to take the same amount of time to fix if the line gets broken. My Verizon telephone service goes down every year or two and usually takes between two and three business days to fix. This is longer than you want to be without phone service, especially when it happens over a weekend, but is a lot shorter than the six business days and one and a half weekends it took them to fix the Speakeasy DSL outage. The obviously relevant difference is that when my phone breaks, I can call Verizon directly, explain that if they need access to the phone closet I need to ask my neighbor for the key, and they tell me when (within one day) the repair person will come and I get the key. When the Speakeasy DSL broke, I called Speakeasy, they placed a trouble ticket with COVAD, which placed a repair call with Verizon. I have a [2]log of all the "communication" that happened between Speakeasy and Covad. From my point of view: * I called to report the problem on Sunday, and was told the break was before the building, so they probably wouldn't need access to the phone closet. * On Tuesday, a Verizon employee showed up at 4:30, and asked for access to the phone closet. I called the neighbor whose apartment the closet is in, who works at MIT, about 10 minutes round trip by car and 20 minutes on foot. She would have been happy to give me the key if I went there but she wasn't going to be home until 6:30 or so. The Verizon employee said that after 5 it was unlikely he could fix the problem because nobody would be in the office, so someone would come "tomorrow morning". * On Wednesday, I called Speakeasy at 5, having waited around all day with the key but with nobody showing up. He said Verizon needed me to commit to being at home for two days. I reluctantly committed to being home on both Thursday and Friday, but asked that the "escalate" because it seemed like the problem should have been fixed by now. * On Friday I called at lunchtime to see if they thought there was any chance at all that Verizon would come that afternoon, and it turned out that Verizon had still not been told that I had the key to the closet, and that they would call back with a new commit time from Verizon. They called back saying that Verizon would come before 3 on Saturday. I had plans for Saturday afternoon, but managed to find a neighbor to leave the key with. * On Sunday morning, the neighbor said that he had not seen Verizon. I called, and was told that Verizon doesn't really come on Saturdays, and that they would be there before 5 on Monday. * On Monday at 11 AM, Verizon arrived, fiddled in the phone closet, and determined that they needed to also fiddle in a manhole. They needed to find a policeman to direct traffic around the manhole, but did so after lunch and fixed the problem by 2 PM. Note that at this point I had spent all or part of 5 days under what I took to calling "Verizon House Arrest". Everybody who had dealt with Verizon repair knew instantly what I was talking about. * On Tuesday evening, when I was running a rehearsal, Speakeasy called to see if the problem was fixed. I said it was, but that while I didn't have time to talk now, I thought their system needed some improvements, and I'd be happy to discuss it at some other time. They assured me that there was no possible way to improve communication with Verizon and hung up. Another possibly relevant difference between getting Speakeasy DSL fixed and getting a Verizon phone line fixed is that it may well be part of Verizon's business plan for selling Verizon DSL to make fixing rival DSL's difficult. If Speakeasy had fixed their system so that it was clearly Verizon losing relevant information instead of Sepakeasy or Covad not transmitting it, they would then be in a position to make this claim through the legal system, and I would be happy to assist them. However, I think if Verizon's lawyers got hold of the log of this trouble ticket, they wouldn't have any trouble claiming that they weren't responsible for this delay. References 1. http://www.speakeasy.net/ 2. http://serpent.laymusic.org/~lconrad/blosxom/diary/dsllog.txt --=-=-= So while my experience of Speakeasy, including my contacts with their support staff, has on the whole been good, and while they're the only outfit that really seems to want to sell me what I want to buy, I can't wholeheartedly recommend any option the depends on Verizon copper, even though it's the one I use currently, and may go on using at least until the next Verizon screwup. Kent> Verizon, on the other hand, which only needs to keep two wires Kent> connected between me and the DSLAM, can't seem to do it. That's true. Kent> P.S. Be careful about complaining to Verizon about anything, Kent> they will use your complaint to retire and write off yet Kent> another perfectly good copper pair. They want everyone onto Kent> Fios. This is not the actual reason -- they were doing that long before there ever was FIOS. They just treat the copper pairs as an inexhaustible resource. Kent> Too many complaints and you might run out of copper on your Kent> street, and not be able to get DSL ever again. Probably. The other problem with this repair strategy is that while they test the service that they were sent to fix, they don't test anything else, and the way they snip things is likely to break one of your neighbor's lines. It's likely that the reason that yours breaks so often is that they're "fixing" your neighbor's lines. And in this part of the world, it seems to break when it rains, too. -- Laura (mailto:lconrad@laymusic.org http://www.laymusic.org/ ) (617) 661-8097 233 Broadway, Cambridge, MA 02139 Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote these books. Ralph Waldo Emerson, address to Harvard's Phi Beta Kappa Society on August 31, 1837 _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss