A little digg'in around and think I found a reason for the T 'preemptive' strike.
The numbers are not bad in perspective, but the spin is.
seattletimes.com
seattletimes.com
Local News
Copyright © 1999 The Seattle Times Company
Posted at 08:34 a.m. PST; Friday, November 12, 1999
AT&T customers unhappy @Home
Background & Related Info.
by Peter Lewis
Seattle Times technology reporter
Picking up on the Puget Sound area's technological hunger, AT&T has been aggressively promoting its @Home service to deliver high-speed Internet access over cable-television lines, advertising it as up to 100 times faster than a conventional phone modem.
Its pedal-to-the-metal marketing campaign - no installation or equipment costs, and 30 days' free service - has ignited interest. The company says it is installing new accounts at the rate of 200 a day.
So what's not to like?
Plenty, according to a growing number of irritated AT&T@Home subscribers who have complained to Seattle's Office of Cable Communications. Most of the nearly 50 complaints have been received since July, when AT&T (which purchased TCI cable operations this year) revved up its marketing machine to sell the so-called cable-modem service.
As a consumer bill of rights protecting customers of the service takes effect next week, city officials think they are seeing only the tip of the iceberg of complaints, and that one reason they don't have more on file is that consumers don't know where to turn.
A city audit, to be released Wednesday, shows that one in five randomly sampled users in the Green Lake area were dissatisfied with @Home service.
"I have no doubt that people are feeling powerless," said Jill Novik, cable-customer administrator with the city's cable office. Novik believes there are far more upset @Home customers than those who have complained to her office.
Customers are griping about complete system shutdowns; seriously slowed connections; down or delayed e-mail service; under-trained technicians; waiting on hold for 40 minutes when phoning for help; and a lack of coordination among locally dispatched AT&T technicians and personnel in Colorado and California who run the operation.
Marketed too early
John Wilkinson had cable-modem service installed last May at his Wedgwood home. He never complained to the city, although he was tempted, but said he had to deal with about 40 people at AT&T@Home before he got the service stabilized.
His log of events and contacts is 16 pages long.
"The real source of failure is the inability of this huge company to get one person to 'buy' the problem," Wilkinson said. "Everyone was so busy pointing fingers in different directions."
Wilkinson, a field engineer for Kodak who is professionally familiar with the customer-service world, said several technicians told him that AT&T's marketing people oversold the technology before the company was able to reliably deliver it.
"They (the technicians) all seemed to feel they were overwhelmed by it and it was foisted on them too quickly," Wilkinson said.
Even Rona Zevin, the director of interactive media for the city's Department of Information Services who lives in Ravenna and is an @Home customer, was stewing.
"@Home e-mail has not worked (to receive e-mail - it sends mail OK) since Oct. 23," she wrote in an Oct. 28 complaint to the city. "I cannot get through to TCI@Home on the phone and have tried for one-half hour per night for three nights in a row."
AT&T admits 'growing pains'
John Dietrich, AT&T's senior executive in charge of @Home for Washington and Oregon, said the company understands the service problems. "We're not trying to turn our backs on them," he said.
He confirmed that AT&T@Home has experienced some "growing pains." He also acknowledged there is some truth to the assertion that AT&T's marketing people may have gone overboard selling the service before the company was fully equipped to provide it.
But to put the problems in perspective, Dietrich notes that the lion's share of the roughly 8,000 @Home subscribers in the Seattle franchise area (there are 26,000 customers in the Northwest) are "extremely happy."
Another barometer, he said, is that less than 3 percent of @Home customers are choosing to disconnect in the two-state region, and that the percentage is closer to 2 percent in Seattle. Still, with last month's 50 percent growth rate in Seattle alone - the number of subscribers jumped from 5,424 at the end of September to 8,098 in October - Dietrich agreed it's a changing environment.
Competition heating up
High-speed Internet access is a compelling, popular service in Western Washington. So-called "broadband" technologies, thought to be the wave of the future, let users download Web pages and access information much faster than by conventional modem. They also provide "always on" access to the Internet.
It's a high-stakes market, with US West and GTE, the region's major telephone companies, offering a competing technology called digital subscriber line (DSL). Both companies say the Puget Sound area is a very hot market.
AT&T's Dietrich acknowledged the company will likely lose customers to DSL, which delivers service over conventional phone lines, if it doesn't satisfy consumers.
Waiting in the wings is a powerful alliance of players, including GTE, America Online and independent Internet-service providers agitating for access to AT&T's cable-modem network so that they, too, can offer the service to customers. Gary Gardner, executive director of the Washington Association of Internet Service Providers, contends that customer service would improve if there were competition.
"Without open access, the company doesn't have to really respond at all (to individuals)," Gardner said. "Remember the old Lily Tomlin character 'Ernestine the operator': 'We don't have to care, we are the phone company.' . . . Competition makes them care a bit more."
AT&T, which requires its subscribers to take @Home as their Internet-service provider and has resisted letting other providers hook into its network, disagrees. It contends that introducing third parties would only complicate communications with customers.
'Took a nose dive'
Still, the situation AT&T now finds itself in is reminiscent of what occurred to US West in summer 1998, when the company rolled out DSL and soon found itself overwhelmed by consumer demand - and ensuing complaints to regulators.
Among those who have complained to the city about @Home is Teri Kessler.
"When I first signed up (in May), it was wonderful," said Kessler, who lives in North Seattle. "Within about a month, the service just took a nose dive."
Kessler said she has experienced complete system outages lasting days, as well as e-mail crashes and slowdowns. She has also sat on hold for 40 minutes to speak with @Home customer-service representatives, who, she said, often turn out to be clueless.
Last month, for example, she phoned to report an e-mail problem. The representative told her there was no problem with e-mail in Washington.
"I was insistent and he transferred me to a Level 2 customer-service representative," she said. "While I was on hold for the Level 2, a recording announced that Washington was, in fact, having e-mail problems. I was then promptly disconnected."
Kessler noted that when cable works, "It's pure heaven." But she estimated she's been in heaven only about 50 percent of the time - while paying $45 a month - roughly twice the cost of a standard dial-up account.
Overall dissatisfaction
Her kind of complaint, though, may be reflected in the city audit that's to be released next week. It shows that 20 percent of the @Home customers surveyed in September in the Green Lake, University District and Ballard areas "were not satisfied with @Home's ability to resolve service issues."
Overall, those surveyed expressed satisfaction, according to Lisa DiMartino, the independent consultant who did the audit. But both she and Steve Holmes, director of the city's Office of Cable Communications, agree that the jury is still out on AT&T@Home's performance.
Apart from complaints from individuals, AT&T is under pressure from the city of Seattle, which earlier this year fined the company (then TCI) $110,000 for customer-service problems and levied $90,000 worth of penalties for missing a January 1999 deadline to finish its cable-network improvements.
In the meantime, some customers say AT&T technicians are using the city's pressure as an excuse for shoddy service.
"There's not a lot of sympathy for (AT&T) at this point," said Seattle City Council member Tina Podlodowski, who chairs a council committee that oversees AT&T's franchise. "They need to be delivering."
The cable office's Holmes observed that AT&T/TCI had three years under its 1996 franchise agreement to complete its improvements, and failed to deliver.
AT&T's Dietrich acknowledges that the looming arrival of Seattle's customer bill of rights has motivated the company to beef up its work force and establish a call center in Fife that will handle service and sales calls for the Northwest by June. Currently, all service calls are routed to Denver, and harder-to-resolve calls are handled in Redwood City, Calif.
Peter Lewis' phone number is 206-464-2217. His e-mail address is plewis@seattletimes.com |
