AT&T !@home

[Edward Glowacki]

I knew it was a bad sign when I drove through Hell (MI) on Wednesday
and there was snow on the ground and all the standing water had a
layer of ice on the surface...  Yes folks, Hell has frozen over
and my cable modem *still* wasn't working...

The tech was supposed to arrive yesterday between 3-5pm to fix my
cable modem (which has been out for a week and a half), so I took
off from work early (using some vacation time...) to wait for him.
Around 6:45pm, he finally showed up, at which time I was in the
middle of talking to the AT&T Broadband guy on the phone about
cancelling my service.  I hung up the phone and talked to the tech
for a bit, he went outside to check the line, couldn't get the box
open to look at anything (possibly frozen shut?), so I just unplugged
the cable modem and let him take it away and cancel my service.
All this after spending over an hour on hold last week trying to
get someone to look at it, and another 15 minutes last night trying
to cancel my service (and the guy on the other end of the line
desperately trying to get me to stay, poor guy, I'd hate to have
his job...).

So for the period of Oct. 12 to Dec. 27 (11 weeks), here are the stats:
Total downtime: More than 5 weeks
Total time talking to tech support: ~3 hours
Total vacation time used for install/repair visits: ~6 hours(?)

Financially this translates to:
Cash cost for 6 weeks internet service: $20
Personal time cost ($10/hr x 3hr): $30
Vacation time cost ($20/hr x 6hr): $120
Total estimated cost: $170

Which gives us an estimated cost per day of $4, or $120/month.
Considering it was supposed to be $20/month, I paid approximately
6x the advertised sale price for internet service through AT&T
Broadband.

Looking at it from the AT&T side, there's 3 hours of phone time
and the associated 1 hour of a live person on the other end, 3 tech
visits to the apartment at about 30-40minutes each not counting
travel time or other factors, the costs associated with the cable
modem (i.e. purchasing and storing one for me to use) and the
infrastructure itself, the cost of the actual bandwidth that I
used, and not to mention the intangibles like my spreading the word
about my horrible AT&T cable modem experiences.  All this for my
$20.  I don't have any exact figures, but I'm sure that AT&T lost
some serious money on my account.

In conclusion, it was a lose-lose situation for me to have a cable
modem.  It cost me far more than it should have for the service,
and AT&T lost money rather than made money by providing me with
cable modem internet access.  

-- 
Edward Glowacki				glowack2@msu.edu
GLLUG Peon  				http://www.gllug.org
Imagination is the one weapon in the war against reality.
                -- Jules de Gaultier