worst isp, bad dsl, worst dsl, bad isp, best isp, best dsl
Learn from my mistake. Please. The last thing you want is to do business with someone who doesn't care about their clients. The last thing you want is to pay for something you're not going to get. The last thing you want is... well... Relaypoint as your ISP for DSL.
What can be so bad, you ask?
When shopping for DSL, there are a few features that you ask about. Each person has things that are important to them. You know, stuff like price, SDSL v. ADSL, uptime, availability and stuff like that. To me, it was important to have an ISP that could provide a consistent connection.
Reliability was key to me. It was so important, in fact, that I wrote it into the deal onto their contract! (see below)
What a mistake. I actually thought that RelayPoint was going to be reliable because it was part of their contract! What a fool I was!
A few weeks later, Pacific Bell came out and set me up with my very own DSL line. After years of modems (starting with a 1200 baud number way back when), I was finally modem-free. The excitement was incredible. Or so I thought.
My first week of service, I was sure that all the problems were on my end. My NT4 computer wasn't set up right, I reasoned. PacBell knew how to connect someone, and surely the connection was stable. It was me. It had to be me.
A week later, after endless reboots and time spent talking to RelayPoint's tech support (as well as being on hold), I finally realized that -- you know what? -- it wasn't me. I started tracking my calls.
But I was having endlessly broken connections. No Internet. For hours at a time.
You're thinking that, because I'm tracking calls and documenting everything, that I must have been looking for trouble from the get-go. Totally not true. See, after a few times explaining my problems to different people at RelayPoint, I realized one thing: they don't document who calls. They have no idea that I called yesterday about the same problem. If anyone was going to be able to show a trend, a pattern, it was going to be me. My first clue of an unorganized company was right here: they weren't even using a shared spreadsheet on a server, let alone professional software like Remedy or Vantive. The burden was on me to document my problems or I could just be making stuff up later, for all they knew.
I didn't want to be accused of exaggerating later.
They had a one-week period where I didn't track anything, figuring all problems were on my end. Finally, on St. Patrick's Day (March 17), I put my first entry into my spreadsheet. Now that I was recording this stuff, I realized how much I had been calling them.
Nine (9) calls to RelayPoint's tech support followed in the next week. RelayPoint was commenting on how "rare" my problem was. (of course, they wouldn't really know, since there was no tracking software). They blamed PacBell. One time, I was on the phone with RelayPoint while they conferenced me in with Pacific Bell's Maintenance line for a total of two hours. That was March 23rd. Two hours on one call alone! If it would resolve the problem once and for all, I was willing to spend my precious time on hold. It would be worth it.
I was fooling myself.
The next day, I composed my first letter to Doug DeStafeno, CEO of Relaypoint.
(let me just say that anytime you have to coax an employee for the head cheese's name, you've got problems. Tessa wouldn't give me DeStafeno's name willingly.)
Here's what I wrote:
Just stating facts. No emotional rant.
The way I figured it, I was doing this guy a favor. No, really. I was letting him know how at least one customer was perceiving his business. I was giving him a list of things that (I figure) MAYBE he didn't know so that, if he really cared about his business, he could fix them. Improve his business. Which would improve his bottom line.
Two days later, I heard from Kelly, the CEO's Administrative Assistant. She was incredibly patient, and really had me believing that she cared about finding a solution to the problem that was causing me all these lost connections. I wanted someone on the business end to respond to me as a customer, not someone in tech support. It took a while to tell her that I didn't want to be transferred back to tech support, but she finally got it.
I think.
See, Kelly never returned my calls after that. Not once did she say she was going to call and then follow through. I think there were about 5 broken promises. I got in the habit of letting her know each time I had to call tech support, just so she could be informed of today's outage. I wanted her to feel my inconvenience. Is that bad? I knew that tech support wasn't going to let her know. I had to.
(Oh, I forgot to mention, I also got a call from the "head of customer service" who had to run off and take care of something and then promised to call me back. He never did. Ha!)
Kelly, the CEO's assistant, also told me something very interesting - my problem's of having no IP daily were widespead among PacBell customers that Relaypoint served. Very interesting, in fact. See, one of the guys in tech support -- one who got to recognize my voice -- infomed me that this was weird, rare and he's never had any problems with PacBell before. Yet, the CEO's helper is telling me it's widespread. The one hand isn't talking with the other.
Since I heard from Kelly, I had at least a dozen more problems. These spanned the next few weeks. More calling. More time on hold. More time being without internet service.
Each time, I was amazingly cool. Never did I yell. I calmly explained that there was a problem... AGAIN. Tech support rebuilt my connection and I was off to the races... until the next day.
If you had told me back when I signed up that I would have to call tech support every other day to maintain my connection, I would have run screaming, my arms flailing in the air. Running.
A month had passed since my first letter, and still, I was suffering hours of downtime, forced to call every other day to get reconnected. I felt I had lost Kelly's ear, as she was frustrated and couldn't provide a solution. I wondered whether the CEO even knew about my problem. It was time to write Doug DeStafeno. Again.
To me, it was a matter of how reasonable should I be? I had called tech support 25 times -- TWENTY-FIVE TIMES -- and still, the underlying problem continued to plague me.
What I asked for: a personal reply. Something from the Big Cheese.
What
I got: nothing
Finally, the guys in tech support found a solution to the long-standing problem. My connection stopped breaking. Things were looking rosy. I called my main contact in tech support and shared the good news (ask someone who does that job for a living how often they hear GOOD news!).
So, I also called Kelly back and asked if we can settle things. That a "gesture of good faith" would tell me a lot about Relaypoint's commitment to customer service. Their dedication pleasing the customer. She told me she'd talk to Mr. DeStafeno and call me back.
Do you think she called back? Naaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah.
So, I called Kelly (getting her voicemail) and asked for a counter-offer to my settlement offer of faster access, for my hours of inconvenience and effort helping them trouble-shoot. For my frustration and "pain and suffering." A faster connection wouldn't cost them much, but it would show me that they care about what I went through.
I didn't demand acceptance of my offer. Just a response.
Nada.
My communication with RelayPoint is done.
I now will tell the world about what I went through, and hope that they tell their friends, and they all tell theirs. I will write consumer advocates, I will contact government agencies, I will talk to my personal friends.
And is Relaypoint still my ISP? You bet. See, in spite of their complete apathy, I still am obligated to my contract. I want to honor it. I will honor it, even though they've wronged me and completely shown they don't care about me or any customer. Each month they get a check from me, it'll remind them of the guy they let down. I guess I want to be the "better one," and honor my commitment. At least one of us will.
Of course, the irony is what I wrote into the contract. The only thing that mattered to me is reliable connections. All I got was the run-around.
Please help me and share my story.
Please tell others of this URL and how unreliable and unprofessional my experience was.
Please do others a favor and send a message that we, the users of the Internet, won't be taken for granted.
We will not be ignored.
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