Yea I was not happy, and insulted when service rolled out and their rep only offered me 5% discount to make up for construction.

Seconded. We had AT&T Fiber a few years ago, and were having techs out just about every week to fix it and were given a nonsense reason like "this cable was loose" each time. Once we got fed up and canceled service, the tech told us that corporate fucked up the install for the whole neighborhood so they'd basically send techs out, tell them to lie, and have them add whatever bandaid was needed to fix it for just a little longer.

The situation with home internet is just so shitty.

The fiber line snapped and fell to the ground within 8 hours of being installed, I called the AT&T support line and was stuck in a recursive IVR menu where it was literally impossible to get ahold of anyone. After our admin tried emailing, calling the tech directly, calling 6-7 different support trunk numbers and got no response (or was routed back to the blackhole IVR line) we were without internet for 36 hours.

I tweeted the picture of the broken fiber cable and had all the members retweet, we got a response within 5 mins and had someone out within 4 hours.

I just jump straight to twitter now in _most_ CS cases with large companies.

Your only option is to escalate to a higher tier support engineer or manager to resolve the issue. I’ve had to deal with their support system for billing errors on their side and once you get to the right person they are very helpful but getting there takes hours on the phone.

Interestingly, one of the early techs put a TDR on the line and found I needed a new drop cable (the cable from the pole to the house). He put the order in. A few hours later a line guy shows up and says "yeah, we're not going to do that." Basically, he said it would cost them $2,000 to put in a new drop cable and he didn't have the authority for that. The next tech that came out basically told me between a wink and a nod that I should have a "tree trimming accident" where the drop cable was "accidentally" severed. I was too chicken to do it. I switched to Comcast and got 10x the speed, for about 2x the price.

We call, after two hours on the phone they agree to send a tech out. Tech takes one look at the pole and says "you're too far from the office. They never should have let you sign up"

Should have done the work myself, but he was already there and seemed at first to be ok.

When you dread any kind of service call you have to have with these people (like ATT taking over a month and multiple, multiple calls, to change a calling plan), you know they are doing something wrong.

If my municipality were to roll their own, I'd sign up in a second. Even at higher price, although I'd expect exactly the opposite.

Google Fiber (which, I gather from stories I've heard from Austin, has its own installation woes) almost made it here. But then Google was like, "Let's ride bikes!"

Meh

After 6 years in a community of several hundred residences less than two miles from a town that does have DSL service, they still couldn't be bothered to drop in a local junction (I'm forgetting my terminology; whatever box it is that can take the place of a local switching center these days in providing DSL service) so that I and my neighbors would be within what they consider an acceptable range for service. This was a couple of years ago; I haven't bothered to check since.

A few towns further downstate finally got so frustrated that they made plans to roll their own connectivity. AT&T took them to court and lobbied the state legislature to prevent them from proceeding.

Back before my last move, I had DSL from SBC (maybe at that time still Ameritech/SBC; and which has since purchased the AT&T name). Phoning up to place the order, the call was answered within a few seconds. Installation itself took three scheduled visits, each requiring a half-day window of my availability (so, off from work), before someone actually showed up to fill the order. Then, they did an absolute crap job, leaving a bare wire-to-wire connection hanging on the ouside of the building. My downstairs neighbor had a friend stop by who was an actual line technician for the telephony part of SBC. That fellow was kind enough to go up and clean up and tape over that connection, as a favor to his friend. Turns out the DSL installers they were sending out were subcontractors.

After that, connectivity would go down frequently. When it was up, traceroute would show a blank-awful lot of bouncing around SBC servers (sometimes close to 10, perhaps more) before a request escaped to the internet. One time when I called for service, I reached a nice support tech who was at the point of boiling over (at the situation, not me). She described how they were subcontractors who filed tickets that were then serviced by other subcontractors (IIRC). When people called up, there was literally nothing more she could do than file a ticket, and she could get no further feedback on the status of that ticket.

I ended up spending about thirty minutes talking to her as she calmed down. It didn't matter with respect to her keeping her job; she'd decided to leave her position the following week. I feel a little guilty that this tied her up, but she just needed someone to vent to after banging her head against the proverbial wall of SBC tech support for too long.

SBC, now AT&T, is one of the few companies I have an immediate aversion to giving any business whatsoever. I know some individual employees who are just fine. But management, particularly senior management and the policies they promulgate, are simply evil.

I hesitate a bit to post this. HN generally isn't a place I consider griping appropriate. But this company's behavior serves such an exemplary role of how not to do business (unless you are a de facto regional monopoly (as they were at that time) and part of a national oligarchy), that it is perhaps instructional.

Oh, and it's been a while, but IIRC SBC was given many millions of dollars in concessions and dismissal of legal charges, in return for their agreement, among other things, to accelerate and thoroughly roll out statewide high speed Internet (DSL). The above description is an example of how they failed to honor this commitment. Instead, they spent their time lobbying the state legislature to have the terms of the agreement altered to exempt them from having to honor it. One example of another lesson demonstrated repeatedly in the state and region: Such concessions, tax breaks, etc. rarely pay off for the states and communities that make them.

I have no great love for any of the major telcos, nor the major cable companies (shudder), but the Death Star is in a class unto itself.

It makes you wonder how many people are limping along with half-broken internet just because they don't know how to debug this and force their way through Comcast's support wall and there not being a competitor they can threaten to switch to.

Encourage your family and friends to do so.

Smaller ISPs will treat you better. They do exist.

I switched to one (sonic.net). I got a call a week after switching from them, "Hi, your internet speed is slow. We can do better. Can we come out there and fix the line noise?"

And they did. Faster than AT&T ever was - no data caps, and $10 cheaper to boot. Totally unprovoked, totally unasked for. It had been so long that I forgot what solid customer service looked like.

AT&T has been sending me junk mail offering me first $35, then $29 and now, $19/month for 12 months. Sorry --- my bar of acceptability has been set back to where it should be and you simply do not reach it. Your pricing points do not matter when I no longer value the services you provide. It's like McDonalds trying to sell a cheeseburger to a vegan.

"You don't actually have to provide fiber service within 10 days at the location you said you were already servicing - but if you don't you're going to be paying $100k+ to AT&T for their expedited buildout to that area."

We were looking to move recently and almost bought a house from a sub company of Persimmons (yeah, we pulled out after we found out they were involved), but the houses all had Fibre to the premises. Except the provider was a monopoly, and was owned by Persimmons. Apparently, you didn't eve get a BT line installed, and were completely stuck with this dodgy 3rd party provider for the life of the property. That and the quality of Persimmons workmanship was enough to make us walk away from what was actually a very "sweet" deal.