SBC has all these commercials about the how good they are and how great their service is. Bullshit, Tommy Lee Jones. SBC sucks, their customer service sucks, their damn fiber optic cable sucks, and their repair guys are dirty old men.

You smug bastard.

For those of you that don’t know, SBC is a communications company. By company I mean giant super-huge quasi-monopoly. They also provide (well, sort of) DSL and dial-up internet service.

My roommates and I have been trying to get DSL since we moved into our apartment in September of 2003. We called up SBC to inquire about phone service and DSL. We were planning on getting AT&T local service because it’s cheaper, but SBC guy said that in order to get DSL from them we also had to get their phone service. “But wait,” you say. “Just take your DSL business elsewhere.” That sounds like an excellent idea in theory; however, “elsewhere” is virtually non-existent, and while there are other (I should say “is another”) DSL provider, service costs on the order of twice as much for a slower connection. I don’t feel the need to mention their name because they haven’t done anything to me and as far as I can tell they’re geared towards businesses and people with more money than my apartment. Also, as we would learn later, trying to get DSL from elsewhere would be quite futile.

So anyways, back to SBC. The guy tells us we need their phone service for their DSL, which means virtually everyone who wants high speed internet in this area (note: no cable internet here) is also obligated to have SBC local service. So we order the phone and DSL and eagerly await our modem. They told us our service would be turned on about 10 days later and our modem would arrive sometime before that.

DSL Activation Day arrives, but alas, the modem did not. We call SBC DSL customer service, which is different from regular SBC customer service, and they tell us they have no record of a DSL account on our line. So we call regular SBC customer service, and it turns out that the guy we talked to 10 days ago somehow failed to put in our order for DSL. We now have to wait another 10 days for our service to be activated with the modem again coming “sometime before then.” The modem comes and we hook it up on Activation Day. The connection light blinks, blinks faster, then goes off. For several hours. We call SBC and they tell us that there’s no copper in our lines, which means we can’t have DSL. However, other people in the same building have DSL, so there must be copper somewhere. We call them up again, and they send out a service tech. The guy gets here and we call our management company so he can get into the basement. The guy lingers at our door while he’s waiting and starts some awkward conversation about the wiring in the building and what the problem may be. It’s during this conversation that a probably 19 year-old fellow college student walks by. Rather than keeping his mouth shut, service guy makes some extremely loutish comment in front of three total strangers. Through our collective powers of deduction, we determine that he is fairly old and quite married, as he is sporting gray hair and a wedding ring, and therefore, a dirty old man. Also, it turns out that while SBC and Ameritech are the same company, they’re not. If the problem is with the wiring outside the building, Ameritech would have to take care of it, and this guy can’t touch it because he’s an SBC tech, not an Ameritech tech. Right. But none of that matters if he can give us DSL service and get his awkward ass out of our apartment. He does whatever he was there to do and we still have no DSL. He informs us that our line is fiber optic, and SBC doesn’t run DSL over fiber optics yet. However, there is hope, since due to some bullshit about six packs (apparently it’s a phone thing, not beer) and exchanges, if we switch our phone number we should be able to get connected.

We call SBC phone service again to switch the number and reorder DSL. This part goes smoothly. However, when we call SBC DSL service, they tell us we still have to wait 10 days for activation. “But we already have the modem and everything,” we say. But they tell us that they need to activate our service, which somehow is a 10-day process, and not (read: most likely) a few keystrokes at a computer terminal. So we wait 10 more days, during which time a modem arrives as well as a letter telling us that we’re still screwed. So we give up for the time being and send back both modems.

Weeks later, we decide to try again, as walking to campus for internet access sucks. This time the service operator tells me that there is a note on our account saying that we can get DSL. If there’s a note, that means someone put it there, which means there was a reason for this, which means something must have changed. Order. Modem. 10 days. Blinking light. Nothing. Same problem as before – we’re on a fiber optic line. No DSL for us.

SBC CEO Ed Whitacre

SBC brags so much about their giant, throbbing fiber optic network in their commercials, so you’d think they would be running amazingly fast, ultra-high bandwith stuff over it, right? Nope. Phone service. Even though they could easily run all of the phone lines and standard DSL service to every apartment in my building (24) about 250 times over, they still refuse to run data over their fiber optic network. Why? Because they would have to give other companies access to them too, SBC doesn’t like renting their networks at what they feel are low prices. But it’s not like SBC couldn’t afford to lay the cable, because they’re still making assloads of money and enough to hire Tommy Lee Jones for their commercials. They also contend that they’re losing thousands of customers and billions of dollars as a result, despite being #27 in the Fortune 500 with revenues in excess of $43 billion. I’m pretty sure this would only increase as a result of running data over fiber optic lines (rather than nothing), especially since many customers would be willing to pay a premium for access at speeds 1000 times faster than current DSL. Also, the other companies would be renting the lines, which gives SBC additional revenue, and due to their quasi-monopoly and the cost of other internet services, they would probably out-compete any other provider. But the customer service guy tells me we’re in great shape for when SBC starts running data on their fiber optics, although there’s no way I’m going to be living in the same apartment when that happens several years down the road. Asshole.

In conclusion, SBC sucks, and all their bullshit about great service is just that - some bullshit.

How do you like your fancy logo now, you bastards?