DSL Rhymes With Hell
by Joanna Glasner
2:00 a.m. Jan. 29, 2001 PST
Few people would seem less likely to use Verizon for their high-speed Internet service than Marcus Lewis.
Lewis, the owner of a tennis center in Leominster, Massachusetts, hates the phone company so much that he created a website dedicated to bashing it.
See also:
DSL: Darn Stupid Line
After the telco -- which recently changed its name from Bell Atlantic to Verizon -- repeatedly messed up the installation of a multi-party phone system for his business last year, Lewis registered the domains BellAtlanticPathetic.com and VerizonPathetic.com in a gesture of protest. Since then, he's been on a mission to convince others to avoid the company.
Given that backdrop, it seemed like an odd turn of behavior last month when Lewis went ahead and ordered Verizon DSL service. Predictably, installing the high-speed Internet service turned out to be a nightmare for him, and he ended up griping and whining about it.
"I know I made a mistake trying to order DSL service through those idiots," he ranted, defending his decision by saying that there were no other high-speed Internet providers in the neighborhood.
"I had no choice. I really needed the high-speed access," he said. "And if getting it meant dealing with Verizon, then so be it."
Lewis isn't alone in his willingness to put up with a lot in the name of high-speed Internet access.
In the weeks since he posted his high-speed Internet experiences on his site, DSL horror stories from other Verizon customers have rolled into his message boards and e-mail inbox on a daily basis. Installation troubles were among the problems cited in a federal class action lawsuit filed last week against the New York company.
It's not just Verizon, either. Installation horror stories abound on complaint sites and message boards across the Web. There's the guy who got transferred from help line to help line in a time-consuming quest to get his service to work as promised. Then there was the subscriber who missed six days of work awaiting home visits from DSL technicians. And of course, all those people who spent hours on hold waiting for tech support had plenty to complain about.
"A lot of people are finding it a lot more difficult to install DSL than they originally thought," said Daryl Schoolar, ISP strategies analyst with Cahners In-Stat Group.
Yet there's a flip side. As much as everybody complains about their DSL provider, they hate it even more when they're not around.
"What people are losing sight of is for every complaint we get about service providers, there's another complaint from someone who wants the service in their town," said Verizon spokesman Larry Plum.
Verizon estimates that it had 540,000 DSL subscribers at the end of 2000 -- an increase of 600 percent in the course of a year.
DSL, or "digital subscriber line" service -- which delivers high-speed data over standard phone lines -- ranks second to cable modems as the most popular residential high-speed Internet service. The number of DSL subscribers has surged in the past year as a result of greater availability and demand from customers hungry for high-speed access. A DSL line operates as much as dozens of times faster than a dial-up connection.
Schoolar estimates that at the end of 2000, there were 1.8 million residential DSL customers in the United States. On average, DSL providers are seeing their customer base grow by 40 to 60 percent every three months.
DSL providers and incumbent local phone companies have allocated huge sums to finance that growth. SBC (SBC), which owns local phone companies serving about one-third of the U.S. population, laid out $6 billion last summer to expand the number of households eligible for DSL. Verizon has also put billions into its efforts.
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