The AT&T Phone System Is Third World.

[robby]

The first rain of the season and the main phone line goes dead. This was happening last year, and they told me that they had located and fixed this problem. The AT&T automated service essentially won't take a failure report unless I authorize a $85 charge if they decide it's my inside wiring, which it is not and never has been. I finally pushed the AT%T envelope and found a live human that agrees the line is bad, forwarded the calls from the main number to another line that still works and will have everything fixed by Monday.

Comments

[hughknox.livejournal.com]

i do phone surveys for at&t. i could tell you some horrendous stories about customer complaints.

[robby.livejournal.com]

I just filled out an on-line survey about another AT&T issue, and not only gave then bad marks but added that I had sent a formal complaint to the California PUC.

[robby.livejournal.com]

This time when I finally got a human (which was difficult), he helped me solve the problem.

Re: rain creates phone troubles very reliably

[robby.livejournal.com]

The internal wiring was done by the AT&T predecessor SBC, and is a short run about 2 years old. I was having this same trouble a couple times last year, and everyone agreed that the problems was elsewhere other than my internal lines. I hope they'll look up the previous problem reports and figure out where the problem is and fix it.

Re: rain creates phone troubles very reliably

[ccjohn.livejournal.com]

I just mean watch them like a hawk, because they'll try and pretend-isolate the trouble to your inside wire in order to charge you. They'll look for any way they can to charge you and try to avoid isolating the trouble behind the network interface because then they have to eat the charge. Remember, this is a company so greedy and simultaneously stupid they'll spend EXPENSE over and over to dispatch on a trouble rain is guaranteed to cause over and over again, rather than spend CAPITAL, once, to fix the problem permanently. How will they try to recover the expense? --from you.

Re: rain creates phone troubles very reliably

[robby.livejournal.com]

I initially called 611 and also tried to report the outage online, but they had set up the process so I couldn't even report the problem, if I didn't authorize a potential $85 charge. I sidestepped that trick by having a sympathetic operator connect me to a local service tech, who did not play around, and did a remote line check and said they would fix the problem today, with no mention of $85.

Re: rain creates phone troubles very reliably

[ccjohn.livejournal.com]

Excellent. Mechanized Loop Testing. The only thing their stupid dispatch guys do, anyway, is sit there at the block, call the 'frame and are told, "give me a ground; give me a short." Which you do with a screwdriver. Telephony's easy. The trouble's always outside anyway, outside is where it rains and poles get hit by trucks and cables get cut by backhoes. How often does anything happen to your inside wire? --almost never. Unless your kid chews on it or something.

Re: rain creates phone troubles very reliably

[hughknox.livejournal.com]

i cant tell you how many complaints i've heard about cutomers buying a "service", for instance, adding call waiting or whatever, and when they get their bill they discover they have purchased SEVERAL services and must go through hell to get them removed.

Re: rain creates phone troubles very reliably

[ccjohn.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that is because the services are "vertical," that is, conceptual feature additions to a customer's POTS service. They're just software configurations in a mainframe.

The problem arises because Call Forwarding Busy, Call Forwarding Don't Answer and Call Forwaring Busy Line/Don't Answer are sold as a package with Voice Messaging Service for obvious reasons -- this is an example -- and that setup by analogy extends to Repeat Dial, Call Waiting, Call Repeat, Speed Call 8, Speed Call 15, etc., they are all most commonly sold in packages not a la carte. Which is why the service order system tends to fuck up when someone orders an individual service & it then installs multiple services. There is a service order charge (around $35) when the company admits a fuckup and has to issue a SECOND service order to fix the screwed-up first one. They have to eat that. They don't like doing that, so instead they'll try to pretend those additional services are the customer's fault. It's evil not so much by intention as by failure. Btw, all us product managers agreed by 1996 all the vertical services should be given away free on customers' lines (to increase landline sales) but the public utility commissions won't allow it. It IS allowed with cellphone companies because they are Not Regulated. Landline regulations date from the 20s & 30s.

If it's not obvious, I product managed every single one of the vertical services. They are very handy but misapplied (obviously) and the stupid local telcos should be deregulated yesterday because cellphones are going to make them irrelevant anyway by 2010.