Entrepreneur Watch

How Rolla P. Huff destroyed Earthlink

Earthlink has been having trouble making money lately. It's abandoning municipal wi-fi efforts to focus on "more profitable" businesses.

Earthlink can't figure out how to run the businesses it has. After years of great DSL service from Covad, I decided to switch to earthlink for phone and DSL because it's cheaper. I was hoping this was still a decent entrepreneurial company, not a jaded loser like the monopolistic telcos.

I was wrong. My service has been spotty. A week ago, the phone line suddenly went screwy, full of static. The static comes and goes, and is so bad that I can rarely get a DSL signal through it.

I went to tech support, and they spent hours getting me to unplug and plug in lines, cycle the modem, etc. Finally they agreed to send out a technician. But I had to wait two days.

The technician checked all my interior phone lines and found no problems. He hooked up his equipment to the main phone box, and concluded that there was a bad signal in the local loop, which Earthlink leases from AT&T.

He told me he would put in a work order to AT&T to fix it, and said the telco contractually had 24 hours to fix it.

No such luck. The line is still bad. I called tech support again. the technician told me that the issue had never been "escalated" to AT&T. She read me the report. It said that tests found no stress on the interior lines, but did find a problem with the local loop. But, since he did manage to get a DSL signal momentarily on one line, he recommended also having my interior lines checked. Earthlink decided my interior lines were the problem.

I demanded to talk to a supervisor. The supervisor insisted that the technician decided not to escalate to AT&T, but said I should have my interior lines checked. I insisted he had said he would put in the order for AT&T. The supervisor said he would call the technician to see what the difference was. He hasn't been able to reach him for the last four days.

I was on the phone for two or three hours with the supervisor while he tried to reconfigure my system for a bridge connection. That worked for about half an hour, and now I can't get a signal again.

The supervisor had to get me to call a different technician to reconfigure my laptop, which runs Vista. I was on the phone for about two hours with that technician, but the Earthlink bridge could not recognize my earthlink password. He kept trying, changing the password, running off to talk to others. He wouldn't quit, despite zero progress. I finally hung up on him. I had wasted five hours.

Yesterday I got an automated call from Earthlink saying their records indicated my issue had been "resolved." If true, press one. If not, press 2. They connected me to another technician.

The technician said he had to transfer it to a supervisor and put me on hold. For one hour, I listened to a recording telling me that my call was very important to them, but all technicians were helping other customers. At the end of the hour, the recording said I had been waiting too long and they had to help other customers, but please call again. Then it hung up on me.

I'm so mad I can't see straight. I have to go back to AT&T for phone, which seems able to run a decent loop when it isn't for earthlink. And I'll go back to Covad.

Mr. Huff, if you want to know why Earthlink can't make money, talk to me.

UPDATE:

I submitted a complaint to the FCC, then called Earthlink tech support again. The automated service asked for my case number, which I entered, and was again told by the machine that records said the issue was resolved. I pressed 2 to get a technician, and the computer told me that it could not reach any at the moment.

Do you think they set up my case number to start ignoring me?

So I called the tech support line again and just waited for a technician without giving the case number. I got a technician, who insisted HIS records show that the case is still open.

Which should I believe, him or the computer? I'll go with the Borg. It knows.

He transferred me to a supervisor, who first said that the report from the technician who visited my home indicated a problem with internal lines, not the local loop. I made the supervisor read me the report, and sure enough, it said there was a problem with AT&T. The supervisor said she would call the technician.

She called back after an hour and said she could not reach the technician. She would send out a new technician, who would stay in contact with the central borg while checking, so there would be no question of what the problem was.

The technician is supposed to be here on Thursday.

In the meantime, I'm using a wi-fi signal from a neighbor to get online. It works sometimes.

Microsoft/Yahoo = AOL/Time Warner

Is Microsoft's bid for Yahoo a surprise? No. Any idiot could have seen this one coming 11 months ago.

Will the deal be consummated? Probably, but nobody knows for sure.

Will Microsoft/Yahoo be a better competitor against Google? No. It would only benefit Google.

Let me tell you a story. I bought a new laptop in December. I didn't want to upgrade to Vista, but there was not one single laptop on the market that came with XP.

Microsoft Office would have cost me more than the laptop itself, so I'm trying desperately not to buy it. That is very hard.

Microsoft Write is incompatible with Microsoft Word. I tried sending an article I wrote in MS Write to an editor at one of the publications I work for. He couldn't open it. So I copied the article into a Google Doc and invited him to share it. He managed to export it as a Word document.

What does it say about Microsoft that, in this day of mass communications and online collaboration, I have to go through Google to translate a document from one Microsoft product to another? Microsoft is still stuck in the 1990s.

Microsoft is used to telling its customers what to do, and punishing them if they don't play along. The only reason I can possibly conceive of for the Write/Word incompatibility is that Microsoft has designed Write to be purposely flawed in order to force me to upgrade. It's punishing me for trying to use Write.

That's old school thinking. In a world of complicated technology, every company should be doing everything it can to make things easier for customers. There is a near infinite universe of fascinating programs on the internet, and a walled garden is simply going to be broken down by the sheer force of the new world outside that wall.

Yahoo doesn't really get it, either. It does everything it can to keep you inside the Yahoo garden, and desperately throws annoying ads at you in the hope that you'll click on one, ignoring the fact that it decreases the quality of the experience for its users.

Combine those two companies, and you have a disaster.

Google isn't perfect, either. It has not made Google Docs compatible enough. When I export as Word, for example, it comes out with manual line breaks rather than as paragraph returns, so does not recognize individual paragraphs. I have to do a search and replace to get the paragraph returns.

Google should have had this fixed by now. If the company can figure out how to make every application it has compatible with everything from Yahoo and Microsoft , it will become the de facto stadard, the universal translator that gives us compatibility where it is woefully lacking.

This is Google's opportunity to really take over.

Unfortunately, there's a decent chance that will also destroy Google. But by then, there will another competitor to come along and take the reins.