Arrrrgh....I hate @Home!

[The Wildcard]

WEll looks like no cable modem for me at my new apartment, lol. DSl it is...

 

[Josh]

Wow. I didn't think more people hated @Home than me Report your problems to DSLreport.com; give those idiots a name that they deserve. A bad one!

 

[RossMAN]

Portland, Oregon people with @Home are you reading this? My friend who bought a decked out Dell Dimension 4100 has had AT&T @Home cable Internet service since August 2000 and has no complaints what so ever. I'm hoping that when AT&T comes around to my neighborhood (SE Portland, Oregon) that I won't have any outages or have to call their customer service center.

Cable is faster and cheaper than DSL but it sounds like their customer service is suck.

Please list WHERE you live if you have an @Home complaint or praise.

 

[tim0thy]

<< Well, you are probably wondering what happened to me for yet another month, and this time it wasn't a new job -- a girlfriend or something of REAL importance >>



I was wondering what happened to you and your many posts.

 

[Josh]

Hahaha Timothy

RossMAN:
I live in New Jersey and my complaint is that @Home customer service is a piece of crap and connection is very unreliable. I think that goes for all of us here in New Jersey at one point in time. The phone-support people know crap, let alone the technicians who no less than I do but have sophisticated tools that do the work for them.

 

[LAUST]

I've had mine for about 2 weeks now and have had very good luck with my service. The technition was a contractor for AT&amp;T, he was totally cool and seemed to know his stuff pretty well. He said my signal was totally awesome. Just from time to plug it in my modem only took 3 minutes to Block-Sync.

But I guess I'll see what time had to tell, 2 weeks is kinda short right now.

But I LOVE these downloads! I was stuck on Dial-up till this time, and to top it all off I was only able to get 26.4 connections from my house.

 

[Pepsi90919]

My complaint comes from Fort Erie, Ontario... COGECO@Home service.

 

[sharkeeper]

Well, this explains a lot. @Home is loosing money and will founder. It's only a matter of time! All your packets are belong to us!® (Of course if I had $0.0001 for every packet that @home lost, I'd double Bill Gates' wealth every six hours!)

Cheers!

 

[Pepsi90919]

Holy crap look at that graph plunge

 

[sharkeeper]

Methinks it's time to go skiing!

Cheers!

 

[SVTPower]

Might as well take your whole Vacation cause the Entire NASDAQ looks like that.

 

[Rendus]

Heh. I'll just go through and address these comments as they appear.



<< So, that is my rant and rave about one of the worst services/customer support I have ever experienced. Not to mention some of the most idiotic technicans that I have ever met. >>



So, why didn't you tell them what's wrong? Or fix it yourself? Oh, you didn't know? Ok then.

I've always found the people who call tech support and go &quot;I know more than you&quot; to be amusing. This is just a variant of such.



<< Please feel free to call @Home (1-888-793-0800; I've memorized the number from dialing it ever so many times) and tell them how much they suck! >>



Yeah, call Joe Tech (I'm a Cox@Home tech support rep myself) and yell at them. It'll get you just about as far as yelling at a wall, but make a PERSON'S day a lot worse. Remember, the PEOPLE on the other end of that phone have no control over their employer's policies.

Moving away from the original comment:



<< Yes, it certainly does. The customer support people really only know two things;

1. &quot;Disconnect the power from the modem and plug it in again.&quot; (usually NEVER works)
2. &quot;I'll have to set you up with a technician&quot; >>



There's not exactly a whole lot that can be done over the phone. Reset the modem, reseat connections, reset again, maybe reprovision if the modem is getting a signal but not syncing. And, actually, resetting the modem works a good 75% of the time.



<< Works great here in CA, i told the guy to sync the modem and get out. Imaginge they won't support dual boot and I have my own GOOD NIC (intel pro100S), very fast up to 600KB/s sustained. >>



An OS is an OS, as long as it's functional. If you're worried about the dual boot, don't tell anyone about it when you call in. And a NIC is a NIC, as long as it's functional. Or at least that's Cox@Home's policy.



<< He said they pull anyone off the street that can read out of a book. >>



For the most part, this is true, as it is with ANY tech support. You should see some of the &quot;techs&quot; at Dell, for example.



<< The problem is that call centers are manned by mostly unqualified zombies that got their techincal skills but reading the 10 page HOWTO guide given out on induction day. Those people who are truely gifted and have a clue, wake up one day and quit. >>



This is exactly what happens. The only 2 &quot;real&quot; jobs I've had so far (I'm 19) are tech support for Dell (and later, Product Specalist/L2) and Cox. Both jobs sucked. But such is tech support. I believe the stat is 9 months on average from hire to quit for the average &quot;tech&quot;. Too bad tech support is the only tech job outside casinos in Vegas.



<< Remember to call their sales line and ask for tech support.
I do it all the time.

Think about it....they think you're buying, therefore they ALWAYS Answer quicker with less hold time >>



And then they sit on hold, just like you would, waiting for a rep to answer, then give an intro, the tech and salesperson chat a minute, then you get transfered over and start all over. All said, you just took longer to get through. Except in rare situations, sales and tech support don't have direct lines to eachother, and certainly don't get priority queues.



<< I've always wondered why I get disconnected after 6 hours of use. It doesn't matter if I'm downloading or playing a game, it just disconnects. I called @Home and the guy said &quot;Must be a period of inactivity&quot; and I said &quot;No, no, I can be talking with friends or anything like that and it just goes off.&quot; And he replies &quot;Probably a glitch or something&quot;. >>



Telco return modem? Probably get disconnected for the same reasons a normal dialup modem gets disconnected.



I'm not trying to defend @Home here or anything, just trying to point out that this is the tech support industry, period. I used to work in a building that houses support for Bell South, Earthlink, Dell, Micron, and Logitech. The techs all came out of the same pool. For the most part they suck, with the rare exception. The good ones are just stuck there because they don't have the &quot;qualifications&quot; (read &quot;certifications&quot to get jobs elsewhere. Hell, I'm going to probably move out of state to get a job somewhere once I get tired of doing tech support again. There was an ad in the paper here in Vegas that required 10 years of JAVA experience. Despite many people informing them that the only people who could possibly HAVE 10 years of experience are quite secure in their positions at Sun, the ad ran for about a month.

 

[IBhacknU]

care to tell us exactly what was wrong Joshpokurball

 

[urameatball]

here in Toronto. my @home connection has gotten much better.

but it took about 5 months of hardware upgrading on their part to bring it to this level.

All in all, it was worth the 5 months of disconnect/reconnect cuz through the last 2 months of service, there's only been about 5 minutes where I was actually disconnected from the internet.

And I could totally live with 5 minutes of disconnections in a 2 month span... given that I'm use to having it disconnect for 1 day every week. I dunno if its getting better in your area, but best of luck to y'all

 

[Josh]

I told you; my modem has been disconnected for about one month. The technicians that came really all had different problems/solutions. So, i really couldn't figure out exactly what WAS the problem.

 

[bozack]

Been through this all before.

my modem went down for two weeks, I got answers from it is our fault cause someone is stealing bandwidth from you have six bad nics in your house, they are all bad even your USB nic.

Even after I told them that I was an on site field tech for nasa they argued with me, told me my network was a breach of their TOS, even though in their TOS they specifically state you can have one but they will not support it, only the machine set up on the modem.

They told me my main comp was not working because I didn't have their authorsied nic in the mahcine and I need to get that before they could continue troubleshooting.

They told me they could cancell my service or fine me because I had more than one machine on my cable modem using win98se nat, I laughed at that.

they told me that the lines in my building were bad

they told me my computer was at fault even when their diagnostic software said it was all on their end.

The email has not worked right since day one

and I am still with them because it is the only affordable option next to dialup.

so far it hasnt been that bad but now when it goes down I only call to complain to get money back on my bill, their tech support is a waste of my time, my pinky finger knows more than all of their level one two and three combined and of all twenty technicians I have talked to I have only talked to one that I would consider on par with myself (sorry to offend anyone working for @home) and I am not the greatest tech.

@home blows goat ass, any other provider is better but some have to make with what is available.

 

[Josh]

<< @home blows goat ass >>



and every other ass possible

 

[RevVveD1]

joshpokeball,

try this.. My service went down dec 4th. 2 weeks later they got it back up....for 2 days.. went down again... 2weeks later it came up for 3 days... went down again...came back up 5 days, down again.... still down.... and they are telling me they will not and cannot credit my accoutn for the downtime, and that I still have to pay 39.95 a month for service..

We called yesterday to cancel it, and they told me they had records of me actively using my account for the last month and a half.. funny.. for the last month and a half if I walked next door to my neighbors yard, i would see 7 feet of cable dangling from my house, split in about 5 places where the neighbors dog chewed through it..

Oh, and it took them 2 hours to finally say &quot;Ok. Your service has been disconnected.. &quot; They actually argued with us about keeping it turned on and how much better it would be if we didn't cancel..

 

[Josh]

Sounds just like my problem my good man!

 

[RossGr]

RossMan (cool name!)

I am in Corvallis, so a pretty near neighbor, We have all to frequent slow downs and outages with service and email. Seems that for as much as they charge they should have more consistent service. Kinda' reminds of the early days of AOL ( I got out after 6 months in '96) when the suscriber base was suffering low quality service while they used our money to build up the server base. Has AOL changed? I doubt it. Will @home change? I doubt it.

 

[Ladies Man]

i have no complaints here in baltimore

guys who came in installed the stuff good, they had to take out the nic i had in there for my home network since it was causing irq conflicts but that was ok i fixed that later

In about 6 months i've had maybe 3 hours down time.

I don't think i can complain

 

[Josh]

I called @home, they said they would refund me for one month; the outage time. But, I requested that they give me one month FREE because of the unreliable service and of course, they refused. ::Josh grrrrs at @Home::