Over the last year or so I've had several go rounds with Sprint and Earthlink regarding intermittent loss of DSL service.
They always are careful to have us chek our Wireless router, our computer and the phone line and these things always check out OK.
Later our lost Internet connection mysteriously returns and works OK for a while without any explanation from either Sprint or Earthlink about what was wrong.
Well, I think I've had enough of this.
It is obvious that they have some sort of systemic problems regarding their network infrastructure and apparently they have some misguided corporate idea that sweeping the problem under the rug, and having ever-so-polite Indians at a call center pretend to help out is somehow going to keep everyone happy. Earthlink's widely proclaimed spam blocking tools are equally incompetent and not worth discussing here.
Well, I'm here to say that this sort of mass deception might buy some time for the foolish corporate strategists who designed this policy but will inevitably lead to corporate ruin - just as the misguided design polices and failure to change the status quo at GM and Ford have gradually undermined these once great companies to their present state.
Many thousands of others must be experiencing similar problems, see the following, from Dave C. - my experiences are almost exactly similar.
Repost of message showing similar network problems (and similar customer "service" (sic) responses follows:
Dave C. Dec 23 2003, 5:30 pm show options Newsgroups: comp.dcom.modems.cable From: "Dave C." - Find messages by this author Date: Tue, 23 Dec 2003 17:30:31 -0500 Local: Tues,Dec 23 2003 5:30 pm Subject: Re: Earhthlink: 502 Permission Denied occurng Intermittently Reply to Author | Forward | Print | Individual Message | Show original | Report Abuse
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I was a Earthlink DSL customer. I would frequently get 502 permission denied, service restricted to Earthlink Member networks error codes trying to access the earthlink news server with my Earthlink DSL connection. I would call Earthlink or "chat" Earthlink, and I was always asked if I was connecting to the Internet using some other ISP. My response was always that Earthlink was my ONLY ISP. That happened for a few months intermittently, and then that particular problem seemed to solve itself. But the last few months I was using Earthlink DSL, I would lose INTERNET connectivity entirely. Symptom was always the same. Modem would have three steady green lights, but no web page would load, and I couldn't ping any address. I was always told to turn off my modem and restart my computer and (of course) this never helped. I was also always told by Earthlink that there was no problem with their network and that the problem must be on my end. But I did notice a pattern where if I didn't REPORT the dead connection, the dead connection would continue indefinitely. On the other hand, if I reported the problem, I would be told that there WAS NO PROBLEM, and then the problem would mysteriously disappear within an hour or two. (!) It was getting to the point where I would have a dead DSL connection for at least 12 hours every other week. I eliminated all my own equipment by trying a different DSL modem and hooking up a different computer to it. It was NOT on MY END. The last straw was when my Earthlink DSL connection went dead for three days straight, and THIS TIME ONLY Earthlink admitted that the problem was on their end. But when Earthlink reported that the problem was fixed, I (of course) still had a dead connection. Around that same time, I learned that Comcast had finally begun to offer cable modem service in my area. So I'm paying more money for Comcast now, just to get rid of Earthlink. Cable modem can be up to twice as fast as DSL, but with DSL you don't have to put up with service slowdowns like I frequently experience around 7PM or so on the Comcast cable modem connection. So if both were equally reliable, I couldn't say that one is a better deal than the other. But I can say with 100% certainty that Comcast cable modem is more reliable than Earthlink DSL. -Dave End of Repost
I hope people at both Earthlink and Sprint see this in the hope that they will come to realize that this kind of corporate strategy will not work in the long run.
Jim Pannozzi