Unrepaired home DSL service from XO.COM in Berkeley, CA

Dear Sir or Madam,

This is a complaint about home DSL service provided by XO communications

in Berkeley, California.

Initially, my home service was provided by a company called Covad. I paid

about $100/ month for 768 MPS down, 384 up, and four fixed IP addresses.

I discovered service out on 2 January 2006 and reported it on 3 January. There

had been severe storms in Northern California on 31 December 2005 and it is

possible service went out then.

The loss of service was assigned a "trouble ticket", number 1027037.

I have made calls to their service center daily or every other day to attempt

to resolve the trouble.

On 5 January the partner company, Covad, left a message on my home phone

saying that they had identified a burned out circuit board in their

central office,

that they imagined might be the cause of the problem. They promised to

replace it within days.

On 11 January Covad promised to replace the circuit board by Friday, 13

January, and give an update.

XO/ Covad has not met these commitments.

At the same time, the repair strategy has functioned on diagnosing the

landline phone service into the house. XO/ Covad dispatched a service

truck that verified the integrity of the phone connection to the house.

My best guess is that this was not needed, as the phone line is intact,

I can dial in and out, and a connection between the internal home DSL

jack and a telephone gives a dial tone.

The customer service technicians at XO have been uniformly competent,

understanding, lucid, and "good listeners". However, they have not been

able to translate diagnosis of a fairly straightforward problem into

effective action to repair it. The ineffectual nature of the system this

company has set up to resolve routine trouble on its lines has wasted

a good deal of my time and theirs, and, at this point, more than two

weeks after the outage has occurred, the problem is still unrepaired.

I would be grateful for any action that might be be possible as a

consequence of posting to your site.

Sincerely,

Roger Brent

Director and President

The Molecular Sciences Institute

Director

Center for Genomic Experimentation and Computation

Berkeley, California

Sunday, 15 January 2006, 8:45am PST