No Quick Solution to Service

Source: The Commercial Appeal

Quite a few consumers of high-speed Internet services are mad and if they had a real choice, they wouldn’t take it any more.

Known as “broadband,” high-speed Internet service for residences in Memphis primarily consists of BellSouth’s FastAccess and Time Warner’s Road Runner. Most other companies that offer broadband service to residences, in effect, re-sell one of these two services. Therefore, a customer’s options in forcing a broadband provider to live up to its promises or to obtain compensation for lost service are limited.

“Broadband outages are a huge problem for me,” said Wayne P. Vaughn, managing partner of 3Doves LLC, a Bartlett Web development company. “I often work from home and outages have a severe impact.

“I use BellSouth FastAccess. On occasion FastAccess is globally down and I must use the dial-up alternative . . . This seems to happen about once every other month or so. Typically, the outage lasts several hours.

“More frequently, a router is not working properly on their network,” he said, which prevents him from reaching his server located across town.

“This can happen several times a week. The outage is often less than (30) minutes, yet the frequency is disturbing.”

Bill Ray, BellSouth’s West Tennessee regional director, said the FastAccess network is designed to be available 99.8 percent of the time, and the service has won several J. D. Power awards for quality.

But Vaughn’s situation does not appear to be isolated or limited to FastAccess customers.

Take Terry Richardson’s situation. Please.

Richardson, a manufacturers’ representative for Clark Owens Associates, has given sales contacts his Road Runner E-mail address. Until late November, he had severe problems with his Road Runner connection, caused by cold weather. On another occasion, his neighbor requested to have his cable service turned off, and Time Warner turned off Richardson’s service, which terminated his Road Runner connection.

He’s not happy about Time Warner customer service.

“You just can’t get them to do anything. Until you get above the first layer or two of workers, you can’t get any action. Most of the time, when you tell them what the problem is, it’s just a total waste of time.”

John Schuler, Time Warner director of online services, said complaints about Road Runner service are “the exception, rather than the norm.”

“We find that in a lot of cases, it’s not necessarily because of the network going down, but it’s a problem in the customer’s own system, such as they installed a new firewall,” Schuler said.

The complexity of the technology involved in providing high-speed Internet service has meant that BellSouth, for example, does not promise as high a percentage of reliability as it does for voice phone service.

“You have a lot more items you are going through, so there are more failure points,” Ray said.

Some customers, like David Mabury, have tried both services.

“In my experience, the reliability of DSL versus cable is a crapshoot,” said Mabury, an information architect with Ringger, a Web development firm.

DSL stands for “digital subscriber line,” the technical name for FastAccess’s version of high-speed Internet service.

“In my last house, I had first BellSouth DSL and then Road Runner for my home office,” Mabury said in an E-mail. “DSL was unstable and I dropped it after a few months in favor of Road Runner, which ran with almost no downtime for nearly two years.

“When we moved to a house in another neighborhood, we again opted for Road Runner. In that location we’ve had repeated struggles with Time Warner over ongoing Road Runner service problems. It has been stable for the last few months, knock on wood.”

Mabury believes BellSouth and Time Warner “don’t really understand customer service, especially for broadband. BellSouth’s customer service was merely bad. Time Warner’s customer service is abysmal.

“I started keeping a detailed log of misdiagnosed problems, fruitless service calls, 45-minute hold times, trouble tickets unilaterally closed with no resolution, messages unreturned, promised calls that never materialized, communication breakdowns among various departments, etc.

“The only reasons I haven’t dropped Road Runner are inertia and the fear that DSL wouldn’t be any better.”

Customers often don’t take these problems sitting down; they seek compensation for their broadband outages.

On Sept. 24, BellSouth’s high-speed Internet service in downtown Memphis went down for most of the day, said J. Christopher Robbins, an attorney who is licensed in Florida and federal courts, but not in Tennessee courts.

This DSL outage affected 13,500 customers, Robbins said, and he sought compensation on behalf of The Map Room, a downtown Internet cafe, and for all of the rest of the affected customers.

It would have cost BellSouth $1.32 per customer, Robbins said.

“As I expected, they told us to take a really, really long walk on a really, really short pier,” Robbins joked. “They rejected the offer. . . .

“Any other company would have given them their $1.32 back, but BellSouth doesn’t have to, and as long as they don’t have to, they’re not going to.”

BellSouth’s Ray said he would not discuss Robbins’s actions because it might involve litigation.

“Any customer who believes they were affected by an outage should contact us — that is, any customers who are entitled to receive a refund that may be done under the contract they have with us,” Ray said. “We would certainly be happy to afford refunds to affected customers according to our procedures.”

Robbins is meeting with affected parties this month to discuss whether to pursue the matter in court.

A lawsuit may ultimately become the way to get better service, said Chris Murray, Consumers Union legislative counsel.

“Probably, the last resort is to get some enterprising attorney to file a class-action suit,” Murray said. “That’s where you’ll catch their attention.”

The limited choice of high-speed ISPs is at the root of the problem, said Sue Ashdown, executive director of the American Internet Service Provider Association.

“The ideal way for the situation to improve is if customers could choose from a variety of high-speed Internet providers,” she said. “I assure you, in other parts of the country, where there are other ISPs who are able to compete . . . with DSL to customers, they typically do a better job of it.”

BellSouth and other regional Bell operating companies maintain that they are already offering services near or below cost, and they are asking the Federal Communications Commission, in effect, to allow an increase in those fees.

If residential customers will, in effect, continue to have an extremely limited choice about what company provides their high-speed Internet service, Ashdown said, “maybe you ought to start thinking about regulating.”

But regulatory agencies have limited or no explicit jurisdiction over high-speed Internet service.

With phone service, for example, customers can take complaints to agencies such as the Tennessee Regulatory Authority, the Mississippi Public Utility Commission or, ultimately, the FCC, to ensure they are treated fairly.

“The problem is that the FCC has been eliminating accounting requirements for network quality of service,” Murray said. “So, at a time when consumers should be getting more information, the FCC seems willing to give them less.”

Murray said he expects the FCC would be unlikely to resolve an individual’s complaint about poor service.

Barry Woody, assistant director of the Tennessee Division of Consumer Affairs, said customers who feel a company is consistently deceptive about its level of service could complain to his agency, which is part of the state Department of Commerce and Insurance.

“We can contact the provider and try to mediate a settlement at that point,” Woody said.

Sharon Curtis-Flair, spokesman for the Tennessee Attorney General’s Office, said her agency “routinely reviews complaints,” and may take such matters up, if they become serious.

Perhaps the best option is something being considered by the California Public Utilities Commission, Murray said. Called a “Telecommunications Consumer Bill of Rights,” it would cover a variety of new services, including broadband.

“The real opportunity is for this kind of initiative to start in California and mushroom out to the other states,” Murray said.

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To see more of The Commercial Appeal, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.gomemphis.com

(c) 2003, The Commercial Appeal, Memphis, Tenn. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

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