This is a letter I sent to my service provider after 6 months of frustration, and a double bill, mistake on their part. This just sums it up...there have been points when I have threatened them physically with words along the lines of "I'll randomly beat your engineers with a baseball bat with nails driven into it for every packet I've lost."they wouldn't have a noc staff anymore...
excuse the grammer see the footnote.
Dear NetTel:
I address this to your company since I’ve it seems as though I’ve already spoken individually to almost everyone there. I’m very tired of dealing with you and as soon as I’m done fighting with Internic we’ll never speak again.
Let me tell you a little bit about the issues we have. We’ll start with your issues with me first.
1.) I’m irate.
2.) You think I owe you money.
Now, my issues with your company:
1.) Poor service.
2.) Poor Customer Service.
3.) Poor Tech. Support.
4.) Accounting dept. from hell.
5.) Idiot managers
6.) Your right hand has no idea what the left is doing…. Nettel does not internally communication
Now let me document a story.
Back in July of ’99 I was investigating leasing a T1 for our business to get off of relying on other people, since you well know 95\% of all people are unreliable. My communications consultant suggests your co. I suggest UUNET. UUNET is more expensive; hence we ended up with you.
Before we signed anything I noted one stipulation: we need redundancy! I had asked for ISDN dial back redundancy on my router. At the time you had stated you do not have a router that can provide this, but in the very near future around November ’99 you would swap out my router with one that would have this ability. I asked for this because we are a financial institution with a fiduciary responsibility to disburse our client’s funds on a daily basis.
That being said, my communications consultant recommended that I purchase ISDN service in September of ‘99 to save on fees. So to be prepared for your service and to save a couple of bucks, since that seems to be the trend, I go for it. Well here we are middle of MAY 2000!!! Where’s my router? I don’t see it, do you? No! Oh that’s right your company decided that my company should wipe our ass with by not providing us with the agreed upon router. My first point in why I think we deserve a credit.
Now lets talk about December. Up till December we didn’t use the circuit that much as we were still breaking it in. Around December 11, ’99 I’m working from my DSL line at home with my partner, and all of a sudden, we lose our xterms to the server. No big deal, we understand Bellsouth’s reliability and just to make sure it’s not the T1 and it’s just Bellsouth’s DSL line we start pinging various area’s in the country. Sure enough we get responses but not from our T1 until about 2 minutes later. I would have understood if this had been a once a month occurrence. Congestion, updates, whatever. So I give you a call, your tech support has no idea but says they’ll monitor the line for 24hrs to see if the problem replicates.
Next day, it’s about 11am I get a call.
“Is this Jon Pastore?”
“Yes.”
“This is so and so form NetTel. Your T1 is down.”
“What? I asked you to monitor my line not break it. What happened?”
“We don’t know.”
“Well when will it be fixed.”
“We currently don’t have an ETTR”
“Do you know anything?”
“Sir, right now we don’t know anything”
Apparently that hasn’t changed.
Every half hour I call to find out.
“this hour 3 DS3’s are down”
“no it’s an OC12”
“sir 5 OC12’s we cut”
“sir several DS3’s are cut”
“sir 2 OC12’s in Miami were cut”
“sir the main hub in Atlanta in out and Texas, Georgia, and Florida are out”
Three and half hours into this lie, I let Don know that we have currently lost about ŭ,000, and without this circuit, since we have no redundancy, I might as well go back into our server room with my dick in my hand since your company has effectively cut the jugular of our corporation.
In your system since someone was dumb enough to send me the log of notes, I see he actually put in the notes that:
(Going to quote as best as I can remember.)
Customer left the following message: “I am very pissed off. You said you are testing my T1, testing it is not fixing it. Fix it now! Call me now!” proceeded to call customer. Customer stated he lost a large sum of money and if we could not get this circuit up he was going into a closet to hold his Dick. Customer then thanked me.
I DID NOT THANK HIM FOR THE OPPORTUNITY TO JERK OFF IN A CLOSET!!!
That is the beginning of the professional credibility your company has lost. I may not have been professional after the 20-30th time calling but that is due to a severe level of frustration from lack of cooperation from your company.
Moving on several hours later MCI gets the circuit back up and the response I get is a construction company was dig where it should not have been. What the hell is that? And why did I get so many different stories? You guys can’t even lie consistently.
Next day.
I lose connectivity again but quickly regain it. I start doing a little testing. I’m consistently losing no matter where I go, 5-30\% of my packets. NOT ACCEPTABLE!!!! I call to report this. The monitor again, and tell me later that it was a framing issue on the router. I find that hard to believe it was working for 3 months prior. Then they tell me it’s a circuit configuration problem and it’s been resolved. It’s not. Then they want data from me to substantiate my claims. Understandable, I would too, but they request trace routes. Trace routes are not effective means of testing anything. First you can’t always resolve where the packet is going and second it tracks 1 packet per hop, meaning each hop tracked the packet can take an alternate route not accurately report what’s really going.
Knowing this I provided them ping –R IP information. This tracks the exact route of 1 packet there and back. This did not make someone happy since I was making them look stupid. That’s ok, they are. I get a call that everything is fine they don’t understand the problem they can ping me from one of your core routers just fine. I proceeded to explain to this idiot that this is not an accurate test. That’s like standing at the top of a waterfall and seeing if any water is going to make it to the bottom. I needed him to test if I can get across the network without any problems. This sparked a fight.
Later I get a call from 2 Epoch.net Senior Level Engineers and 2 NetTel Senior Level Engineers and their supervisor. Usually a Senior Level Engineer has a staff below him, but I guess your corporate structure is different then that of a normal corporation. Not surprising, nothing else about your company has proven to be normal either. Anyway, I’m explaining the stupidity level of the last call I got and how moronic everyone I spoke to was and I hope that he can fix my service and kick his employee’s till they hemorrhage for their insolence. He said he wouldn’t do the last half. Too bad, I felt that your company is long overdue for a Darwinnian thinning of the gene pool.
I’ve called about periodic outage and service. All useless cries for help. I still get random outages. Take for example yesterday May 8, 2000. I had 9 1-5 minute outages. That is unacceptable.
Lets move on to another reason why I deserve a credit.
Two weeks ago I get a bill from you saying that I’m late on last month’s bill and what my services were for this month. I can assure you there is an accounting error on your part. We handle other people’s debt. How asinine would it be if we didn’t pay our bills on time? As soon as we receive our bills we pay them. And as soon as we get the canceled checks back from our accountant we’ll get fax you a copy of our check.
But lets assume we owe you the money. Since we all know when you make assumptions you make an ass out of u and mptions. But if we did owe you the money I’ve substantiated enough reason for more then enough credit just in the ISDN and server received so far. But you may think that that’s not enough. I understand you in the businesses of making money not giving it out. I hope that you are also a business about standing behind it’s products and employee’s and their actions.
Which brings me to my next point. This schmuck Striker I believe his name is. In a rude manor he asked to speak to Steve Miller the Vice President and the man who cuts the checks around here. My customer service representative asked if this was a personal or business call. Striker stated personal, (actually it’s business, another lie). When questioned further by my representative he rudely stated that he wants to talk to him because he doesn’t pay his bills and owes your company money.
Now I’m sure you’re going to try and blame this on an outside agency but I doubt it’s policy after 1 month to put a customer in collections.
Just to let you know, aside from pissing off a few people, Striker also violated what’s called the Fair Debt Collection Act, by advertising our alleged debt our employee’s. It’s also an FCC violation punishable by a บ,000 fine. I know this because we inform our clients about the Fair Debt Collection Act every day. We speak to hundreds of people a day and it’s all over our websites on all 130 domains and 2000 virtual hosts.
I know about the violation because the representative that made the violation did so to someone who worked for a collection company, which did it on a regular basis and was constantly getting spanked by the FCC.
Now I was called again recently and was asked “Just One question” by a rep of yours, at least 10 times. So I guess she doesn’t understand English too well or else felt that disinformation was appropriate at this point, even for something as trivial as the number of questions she wished to ask me, par for the course. And “Just One” of the questions was if I was so displeased why didn’t I switch carriers?
First I was not aware that it was common practice to insinuate that “If we suck then go somewhere else.” I thought it should always be “Let me note your problems and suggest solutions to the appropriate people.”
Second I am in the process of switching. I ran a 2nd T1 in here from Excite @ Work. Yes it is a little more money but they offer a feature your company does not even know the definition of, reliability. I was going to try and keep your company around for redundancy but when I asked my network monitoring software, “Monster, Monster who’s t1 is the fairest of them all.” ( Monster is the server name) Monster replies with NetTel Sucks go elsewhere.
So once I am done with Internic and I have migrated all the domains ip’s virtual hosts etc. I can assure you won’t have to deal with us anymore.
But I’m not paying this bill. And in return I will not call the FCC. More then fair, more fair then your company has been to me.
I would appreciate a prompt response. I know that that may be difficult, but please try.
-Jon XXXXXXX
IT Manager
XXX-XXX-XXXX
p.s. any misspelling or improper grammar I chalk it up working for 19hrs straight. I have a very odd schedule, don’t be afraid to wake me.
