[Tfug] DakotaCom and Gain Merger

[Chad Woolley]

I'll probably get flamed for this, but it's purely empirical evidence.

I've had Qwest Residential DSL (originally azstarnet, or did they go
before dsl came out?) since it first came out (around 99, give or take
a couple)?  Even though their techs typically take a few trys to get
something working, I've been happy with the reliability.  I estimate
that I have maybe one outage per year.

I think I do have a pretty good line, which is probably just luck due
to my location (house around Kenyon and Pantano, built about '64).

Even though there are plenty of things to complain about Qwest, my DSL
stays up, which is good because I work at home.

Also, they refused to sell my cell phone records to the government,
which makes up for a few flubbed tech calls, in my book ;)

-- Chad

On 9/10/06, Steven Bowers <steveb7 at bblabs.net> wrote:
> tonyh at engr.arizona.edu wrote:
>  > I think nationwide may also own the company that took over the sprint
>  > broadband stuff (thats what a river employee told me but I didn't
> confirm it independently).
>
>
> I've refrained from this whole discussion since I work for Simply Bits
> and I did not feel it was appropriate to chime in since my opinions
> would be biased. However, on the subject of Sprint Broadband that is a
> different matter. I used to work for Sprint Broadband and I still have
> contacts there so I can tell you a little bit about how they have
> changed as well as a little bit about their decline.
>
> Sprint sold its customer base to a company called Kite Networks. Sprint
> still owns the spectrum in which they operate, the tower sites and the
> network operations center. Customer and Technical support is now run by
> Kite Networks. All the employees were retained but their pay and
> benefits changed (those with Sprint cell service got shafted since they
> were no longer Sprint employees). The technical support staff, have had
> customer service and dispatch responsibilities added to their plate. In
> addition they are also responsible for providing support for the metro
> Tempe WiFi network (which as I understand it is a massive headache).
>
> They had peaked at 50,000 customers at one point but then began to lose
> 2% of their customers each month due to various problems. When I was
> laid off they had just dropped below 30,000 and were still losing
> customers. Personally I attribute their downfall to the outright lies
> they told customers and the poor decisions made by mgmt.
>
> Sales staff told customers it would work for gaming and VoIP while tech
> support personnel in the next room were being told the exact opposite.
> We were told it would not support these functions because they did not
> have enough upstream bandwidth. Customers were sold on the premise that
> they had "up to 256Kb of bandwidth" yet internally we would only support
> up to 4Kb. That was later reduced to 1Kb and finally it denigrated to a
> point where we were told we don't support upstream speeds.
>
> During their heyday the sales staff did a promo at Tucson Mall. As part
> of the demo they did some on-line gaming. That promo was rigged. They
> engineered a link back to the transmitter so that everything would work.
> That link was not typical of what customers were sold.
>
> They had a problem with equipment that kept spontaneously rebooting.
> Sprint had blamed Hybrid (the manufacturer of the broadband router aka
> the Sprint modem) and claimed it was unfixable. It was not until the
> problem came to the attention of someone at Kite nearly five years after
> Sprint began that it got fixed. It was one line of code in a FreeBSD
> machine. Kite rewrote that line, added a little bit more RAM and POOF,
> problem solved!! Kite certainly deserves credit for that. Since that
> time they have managed to level off and are no longer losing 2% of their
> customers each month.
>
> Sprint does NOT own the upstream bandwidth in which they operate. They
> had tried to convert customers in Tucson and Phoenix to something they
> called "in-band" which they placed upstream connectivity in the same
> spectrum as the downstream connection. However, it was never completed
> and only a very limited number of sectors have the capability for
> In-Band, and an even fewer customers have In-Band service.
>
> They had a customer in Phoenix who lived so far out of town that he was
> outside the boundaries set by the FCC for our transmission range. This
> person had a clear line-of-sight back to the transmitter and could
> actually get a signal, though it was very marginal. One group within the
> company did not want to install service for him based on these issues.
> However, the customer made a real stink and the other group caved in to
> his demands. They told him we would install service but because he was
> so far away we would not support it if he had problems. He signed a
> document that said we would not roll a truck unless he had an equipment
> failure, that he could not call tech support for anything other than an
> equipment failure. He agreed to all of this and signed the waiver.
>
> This person called nearly every day to bitch and complain about how poor
> his service was. He later tried to file a class-action lawsuit against
> Sprint.
>
> A California customer got upset with us when his IP address changed. We
> tactfully reminded him that the IP was dynamic and belonged to Sprint.
> He faxed us a copy of his contract. His sales person had crossed out
> that whole paragraph about IP assignments and had hand written in the
> sidebar that he was guaranteed the IP that was assigned to him (the
> sales mgr even signed off on it). Two of our tech support staff spent
> hours manipulating a system to get the IP address re-assigned to him.
>
> These are but a few anecdotal examples of the problems at Sprint.
> Initially I was not happy about being laid off. My anger grew worse when
> I learned that the person who made the selections did so based not on
> seniority or job performance, but on who she liked within the company.
> My anger turned to rage when I learned that certain persons had been
> reprimanded, and others suspended, just weeks before I was laid off. In
> retrospect it was just another example of how poorly managed Sprint
> truly was.
>
> Without trumpting the Simply Bits horn too much I will say this. From
> the day I started at BB Labs to its acquisition by Simply Bits a year
> later I've always been told one thing consistently - "Tell customers the
> truth". There is a night and day difference between the mgmt of Sprint
> and that of Simply Bits. At least here at Simply Bits I consistently see
> the owners sweating their ass off up on a roof in the middle of summer
> to get a customer installed, or on a roof in the middle of the night to
> fix something. You would NEVER have seen that at Sprint.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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