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Technology Stocks : AUTOHOME, Inc -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ron Dior who wrote (27301)	2/19/2001 8:24:54 AM
From: E. Davies	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 29970

Not all is happy in DSL land: High-Speed Waiting Game Pacific Bell's DSL woes continue as customers can't get the Internet access they have ordered Dave Quinlan in San Mateo eagerly signed up for DSL with Pacific Bell last March, hoping to access the Internet at lightening speeds compared with his pokey dial-up modem. Peter Rugh in Berkeley and David Von Toussaint in Hayward followed suit in April after Pac Bell promoted the service with frequent television and radio ads. Nearly a year later, however, none of them has DSL, which works over conventional phone lines. But, like clockwork, Pacific Bell bills them $39.95 a month for the service. "I call every month and am told it is being taken care of," said Quinlan, a shipping supervisor for Tyco International. "Every month, however, (the charge) appears back on my phone bill." Quinlan said the charges started showing up shortly after he placed his order, even though he was later told the service wasn't even available in his neighborhood. He eventually signed up for cable-modem service, but can't figure out how to stop Pacific Bell from billing him for DSL. Pacific Bell spokesman John Britton downplayed the glitch, saying it affects less than a fraction of 1 percent of Pacific Bell's half-million DSL customers in California. "These are aberrations," Britton said. "We don't have a big billing problem. " Still, the complaints appear to be just the latest headache related to Pacific Bell's DSL service. Like other DSL providers, Pacific Bell parent SBC Communications has had trouble keeping up with heavy demand for the speedy Internet service and coping with an array of technical snafus. Many customers say it took months last year to get their DSL lines up and running. Others fumed that e-mail servers were frequently shut down, or they had to spend hours on hold to get technical assistance. At one point, the company had a backlog of 100,000 orders in California alone, mostly in the Bay Area. And SBC finished the year with 767,000 DSL customers across its territory, including Texas, Oklahoma and other states, far below its goal of 1 million. The problems aren't unique to SBC. At least a half-dozen DSL firms have shut down or filed for bankruptcy protection. And dozens of other companies have been tarred with customer complaints on Web sites like Dslreports.com. Redwood City's ExciteAtHome, which provides high- speed Internet access over cable TV lines, recently scrapped plans to branch out into residential DSL because of the glitches at SBC and elsewhere. In addition, Pacific Bell has been hit with several lawsuits. One accused the company of not giving customers a four-hour appointment window for DSL installation visits. Pacific Bell says customers simply need to ask. Another accused Pacific Bell of using bait-and-switch tactics on a DSL offer involving a Compaq computer system and free service for the rest of 2000. Pacific Bell declined to comment on the suit. Still, SBC executives said the DSL glitches were magnified at its company by a requirement that it set up a separate division, Advanced Solutions Inc., to handle DSL orders last year. Federal regulators mandated the move, in exchange for giving SBC permission to purchase Chicago's Ameritech, the dominant local phone company in the Midwest. Britton said the billing snafus apparently resulted from errors when orders were transferred from Pacific Bell to ASI, the new sister company. Plus, SBC has yet another division, Pacific Bell Internet, that handles accounts once they are up and running. "Our biggest problem is we have customers calling the wrong place," Britton said. He said customers who are mistakenly billed for a DSL line should call PBI at (800) 638-4357. Regardless, Britton said most of the errors already have been fixed. And he said customer service representatives readily give out refunds when customers complain. "No one is going to be forced to pay anything they don't owe." Still, Rugh said he has had trouble getting credit; he now has a balance of $159.80 on his phone bill for the DSL service he never received. "They have given me one credit out of the half-dozen times I have called," said Rugh, a retired lawyer who now leads tours of Pacific Bell Park, the Giants playground that shares the name with the phone company. "I have just sort of given up." Rugh wound up subscribing for cable modem service instead. Von Toussaint said he would just like the charges to stop. "I'm tired of having to call every month for the last eight months," he said, adding that he usually spends 45 minutes to two hours on the phone each month trying to receive a credit. "I do have better things to do."