- Average user rating: 1.0 stars out of 55 reviews Back to product review
- My rating: 0 stars
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3 out of 3 people found this review helpful
1.0 stars
"Terrible, terrible service"
Pros: was reliable
Cons: appalling service, absolutely useless
Summary: My job involves supporting a real-time data feed financial systems. Support is critical when the system is not behaving as expected and my job depends on fast, effective response, typically within minutes of a problem. I work in an office but I am on call 24x7 and rely on my home internet connection (DSL) to provide me access to our clients.
If Earthlink's DSL support was how we did things, the company for whom I work would have gone out of business a long time ago.
I noticed my internet connection was down four days ago (Sunday).
When I returned home, the service was still down (Monday). I gave it a day to "recover" (plus I went to the office and our Verizon cable and dsl - total 3 lines - works great).
On Tuesday I called Earthlink's tech support. I spent two hours on the phone with someone with massive phone lag (delays), who was difficult to understand (I work with all sorts of nationalities as our clients are worldwide), who ran me through a number of steps to try and fix the problem (I can't get an IP address from Earthlink). He was very thorough and checked the phone line (I already checked), the modem (ditto), cabling connections (ditto), etc. When this failed, he simply had me repeat many of the steps. This went on for a long time. I had to suggest to him things to try - he agreed that some of them were good ideas (for example, using a different DSL modem as I have 2 spares). After two hours on the phone, he told me that he would have to escalate.
After 24 hours, on Wednesday, I called back to get a status update - my case had been "escalated". I was on hold for about 60 minutes before I got to the "second level support". They were also laggy and difficult to understand. When I asked for an update he NEVER responded to my question, even to say "I don't know". Instead he asked me to perform many of the same steps that the first technician asked me to perform. Of course these were all unsuccessful.
Finally he asked to schedule an onsite visit during hours during which I'm not available. there was no alternative. I asked for any kind of escalation. He told me the vendor would call in 4 hours or later (2:30 AM on). It is 9:40 and I have not received a call or any kind of update.
I checked Earthlink's site for known outages and there were none. I made no changes on my side.
I am paying 33% more for my DSL service than a much faster service available from SBCYahoo. I avoided changing things as I didn't want to go through the 6 weeks of problems getting my DSL started (after the line was put in, after the modem was in, I did not have service for approx 6 weeks). But now I don't have a choice.
I am cancelling my service and I think that NO ONE should even think about getting Earthlink DSL service.
