Complaint Review: SBC Yahoo DSL - Dallas Texas

I have moved to Dallas in July 2007 for a six-month internship at Texas Instruments and signed up for SBC Yahoo DSL after seeing an advertisement about Yahoo DSL being $14.95 a month. The saleman told me that including tax monthly bill will be $35, which is still cheaper than cable I thought. The first month I was billed ~$150, the bill included $50 for the modem whose rebate I still have not received and various taxes totalling ~$50 for a new phone line. That was still OK for me.

However, what makes me mad is that since September 3rd, I noticed my internet connection is suddenly gone. I was able to use internet the day before. I can see the ping to www.yahoo.com is working but there is 10%~20% packet loss. I was pretty sure the problem was in the DSL central office (CO).

I called the tech support and a guy with Indian accent started from the beginning obviously according to a manual by having me reset the modem, disconnect and log in again, clean the browser cache, manually set the DNS address and so on which cost me an hour and half. Even if I repeatedly told him that since the ping works so the DSL modem and the DNS must be working, and my suspicion that there is something wrong with my regional DSL CO, he would not listen because obviously the manual has higher priority than the customer. I told him I will wait for a couple of days and try again to see if people at my regional CO fixed the problem.

After 3 days I tried to use the internet and the same problem is still there. I called tech support again and they had me do another set of resetting the modem and rebooting my PC etc. Then the Indian technician said please hold he will call a "2nd tier technician". After holding for 10 minutes or so a "2nd tier technician" without Indian accent answered the call and I had to describe the problem to him all over again and he had me reset the modem, logout/login, reboot my PC with safe-mode etc. The same problem stays. After another 1.5 hour he finally said he will "file a ticket" and that guys at my regional DSL CO will call me the next day, and that there may be charges if technician comes to my apartment and find my modem is broken (who's fault is that in that case?)

The next day (9/7) I received a call from a lady with African American accent (apparently from local) saying that my region is in "critical" status but she cannot dispatch anybody to the central office to fix the problem until 9/12.

So now I am left without internet at home for half a month, without a gaurantee it will be fixed after 9/12, neither do I have the choice to cancel their DSL service and switch to cable due to the high initial cost. A ~$70 cell phone over limit usage charge is waiting for me for the 3 hour talk with their useless tech support entirely due to their fault of not having the most basic service outage monitoring.

I will never sign up for SBC Yahoo DSL again and I will recommend everybody I meet against signing up for SBC Yahoo DSL.

Zhiheng cao

Dallas, Texas

U.S.A.