Verizon DSL Out for 5 Days (and Counting)

As we go into our 5th day of a “widespread DSL outage” here in Western Washington, I find it incredibly ironic that I should receive a junk mail from Verizon telling me about their great new “faster than ever” DSL. How about faster than zero bits per-second? Pretty much anything beats zero.

The story we are getting from Advanta, the ISP through which we ordered our Verizon DSL service is that someone at Verizon destroyed all DSL circuits supplied through the ISP due to an “administrative error” (isn’t that a nice way of not explaining a damn thing?). That happened on Thursday morning at 10:46 AM PDT. It is now after noon on Tuesday, 5 days later. Our business still has no DSL service and we have no ETF.

How did Verizon respond to this incredible act of complete incompetence on their part? They responded by first telling the ISP that each one of the DSL circuits had to be manually re-created and that this could only be done from the East Coast (?). They also told them that despite the loss of service (and a great deal of time and money to affected and afflicted businesses that they would definitely not work on the restoration of circuits over the weekend. They might be able to bring some of the circuits starting Monday morning but couldn’t’ say which ones or by when. Monday they told the management of the ISP that they would provide them with a complete list of who was still out and when they would be able to bring them up. Well, here we are. The ISP brought in extra techs to call customers with the information so customers could plan. It’s Tuesday PM and I just decided it’s time to exhale and start the process of letting a broader audience know what these bozos are doing.

Given how critical broadband services are to our business, and how much more critical they will become, I for one am going to become very active in lobbying for regulation of broadband at the State, Local, and National level. We need enforceable service level guarantees, penalties for non-performance, and anything else that will bring these arrogant bastards into line.

Sincerely,

Dave Watts

Managing Director

Advantros Corporation

Bellevue, WA 98005

425-885-7700 (Ofc)

Email User

www.advantros.com