Tuesday February 15 10:00 AM EST
DSL deployments hitting snags
By John Rendleman, PC Week
Despite providers' pitches, problems surface with installation delays, support
Businesses looking to DSL for high-speed Internet and LAN access are finding that getting and using the much-hyped service isn't as easy as it sounds.
Behind the growing number of alluring pitches from digital subscriber line service providers, some business customers are finding long installation delays, inadequate customer support and conflicting claims about security.
? ISPs Say Small Town America Clamors for DSL
? Line-Sharing Rule Tips CLECs Toward ADSL
? Gateway, AOL team up for DSL
? DSL Is Speedy ? But Is It Satisfying?
? Broadband Superguide
Just ask Lance Gingell, a senior engineer at Matrix Logic Corp., in Novato, Calif. Gingell ordered DSL service from Flashcom Inc., hoping to use the speedy access to set up a home office. After eight weeks and still no service, Gingell resumed using his ISDN connection.
Flashcom, the Huntington Beach, Calif., company known for its ads featuring rocket-powered turtles, claims to be the leading provider of DSL services to residential and small-business customers nationwide, with about 15,000 paying DSL customers. But it also has a backlog of 15,000 to 20,000 customers waiting for service, according to the company's own estimates.
Flashcom is not alone.
DSL wholesaler Covad Communications Co. is struggling to get installation wait times below one month. The wait for provisioning is about the same at Rhythms NetConnections Inc., in Englewood, Colo.
Provisioning DSL to a user's home or business site "is a very complicated process right now, unfortunately," said Christopher Rose, vice president of business development and interim chief financial officer at Flashcom.
Still, the growing backlog and increasing customer complaints haven't slowed DSL campaigns? even in markets where availability is limited. "This is not dial-up [service], and we want to make it as easy to get as dial-up. But we just are not there yet," said Christopher Callender, director of marketing at Covad, in Santa Clara, Calif.
The company expects further relief by the third or fourth quarter, when the Federal Communications Commission's proposed line-sharing rules will enable Covad and others to speed coordination with Regional Bell Operating Companies.
DSL is more attractive to small businesses than traditional dial-up service because it provides a base transmission rate of 128K bps on top of existing phone lines for an average of $40 to $300 per month. In contrast, dedicated hookups, such as T-1 lines, typically range from $1,500 to nearly $3,000 per month.
On the other hand, DSL is available only to users within three miles of a telephone company's central office.
Analysts estimate 1.5 million businesses will switch from dial-up or ISDN access to DSL by 2002.
Meanwhile, providers are throwing money at the disgruntled-customer problem while they sort out DSL's technical limitations. For example, Flashcom has spent nearly $12 million this year beefing up customer support, company officials said. "We believe that the levels of complaints have gone down in recent months as we've added staff," Rose said.
New back-office systems are also helping to manage sales, provisioning and tech support.
Covad, too, is adding staff and resources before it starts offering service in any city. In addition, it's installing a universal electronic interface for its partners, including Flashcom, in an effort to streamline ordering and installations.
Rhythms continually adds to its work force (now at 1,300 employees) to keep up with demand, "but that's more of an industrywide challenge than one that's individual to us," said Michael Sabo, Rhythms' director of innovation.
All this, however, has been of little consolation to Matrix Logic's Gingell, who had to run a gantlet of red tape at Flashcom to get a refund on his deposit for the undelivered DSL.
Even customers expecting difficulty getting DSL said they've been unpleasantly surprised with how long it took and how difficult it was to resolve nagging concerns such as security.
"We're happy to have DSL now, but getting it installed for the business has been kind of a distraction, even though we were realistic and our expectations were pretty low," said Michael Kornegay, an Atlanta-based software developer. After ordering a 256K-bps SDSL (symmetric DSL) line from Rhythms in September, Kornegay's company, which he asked not be named, received various explanations about why the service was late until it was finally installed in late January.
On top of the delay, he said security became an issue when a Rhythms customer service representative erroneously said there was no way to secure the two-way 256K-bps DSL link using a firewall.
"A company getting DSL service really has to have some internal technical talent to ask the right questions about security," Kornegay said.
Rhythms officials called the company's experience an isolated instance.
And problems don't necessarily end when DSL is delivered. "We didn't have trouble getting it provisioned, but we have had problems with the reliability of our DSL," said Allen Falcon, president of Horizon Information Group Inc., in Boston. Horizon wanted DSL to soup up its corporate Web site.
"Most DSL providers are not offering service-level agreements, so there are no penalties for service disruptions, and nobody is accountable to the customer," Falcon said. Horizon, which uses a 384K-bps DSL service provided by UUNet, experienced several lengthy disruptions capped by a weeklong outage in December, he said. See this story in context on ZDNN's Page One Section. |
