AT&T Technical Support: Technician Visit (For Real This Time)

On Saturday, from 8AM – 12PM, I waited in my apartment for a scheduled AT&T Technician to arrive. The issue I first experienced in July (weird, intermittent connectivity… that would be resolved by simply logging out, then back in to Airport) returned. Over the past few days, it began getting worse and worse… with our Internet connection dropping out seemingly every few minutes.

This time around, instead of calling in to their technical support line (which seems to always require a labyrinthian path through speaking and number-punching)… I decided to go the Twitter route. I’ve found that every time I call in to tech support, it takes at least 10 minutes to get to an actual person… and sometimes, that person will redirect you to some other department.

Since I have a dry loop (DSL only, no other phone or cable service), it’s hard to know which department I should go to. Invariably I guess wrong, and I simply didn’t care to spend more time on the phone, waiting to talk to a person. So last Wednesday, I contacted one of the many ATT reps on Twitter – specifically, @ATTTeamTrevor is the person who responded to me (though he signed many of his posts as “CathyW”). I voiced my complaint, and s/he agreed to contact a higher level of tech support for me.

After waiting through the first business day, I learned that the turnaround time for a tech getting back to me was 24 – 48 hours:

I was hoping someone would get back to me the same day, but I figured – fine, I’ll wait. At that point, even though I’m sure I could have spoken to someone over the phone… I just didn’t feel like re-hashing the entire story again to a Level 1 tech. So waiting it would be.

The next day, around noon… I got a call on my cell. Spoke with a nice guy who said he noticed issues on my line, and would send someone out to my apartment. I recapped things a bit, and also complained that the last time someone was to come out… they technically didn’t, as far as I was concerned. I went so far as to recite the guy’s employee ID, and this kind of caught the technician I was speaking to by surprise.

// Edit: I hate to say it, but I derived some small bit of satisfaction in this. I know I’ll likely never know what the backstory was with my prior appointment, but I’m still curious all the same.

Fast forward to Saturday, when an indoor tech was scheduled to arrive. Liz and I were at home all morning, eating a late breakfast and watching a movie in the living room. When 11:30 rolled around, I was loathing having to call up AT&T to find out what the deal was (yet another trip through their phone service tree). At 11:45, I got an automated call saying that it would be likely my technician wouldn’t hit the 8-12 window. Additionally, I was told that I would be bumped to the next time window, and that a tech would arrive before 2PM.

Ok – not too bad. I liked the fact that I got notified, and also that I was promised a shorter window, even if it was a little past what I signed up for. Shortly after noon, the tech gave me a call and by 12:15… he was inside the apartment, checking out the modem.

After running some tests, he determined there were a few possible causes for the problems on the line. One was the modem itself (which was what I’ve been pushing for, all this time). The other was the fact that internal building noise might be a contributor – if the phone line was running next to electrical, etc. Seeing as how the DSL had been fine for over a year, and only recently started to give us problems… this seemed less likely to me.

A third thing was what’s called a “tap,” outside the building. Apparently a “tap” is a small bit of line that branches off the main line, but ultimately goes nowhere. Sometimes taps don’t cause any problems, other times they do… as they can sometimes turn back and “ping” themselves… or something like that. In the case of our apartment, the tech noted a tap outside of 90 or 120 feet… and was going to get an outdoor tech to come and remove it.

The guy I spoke with was incredibly polite, knowledgable, and answered all of my questions. As we were talking, he showed me several graphs on his iPad, indicating tests that showed a few problems. We ended up swapping out the old modem with this newer one (pictured above).

Unfortunately, when he called in the work order to have the outside tap removed… the woman on the other end of the line wasn’t showing any problems on the line. This was, according to my tech, due to the fact that the new modem (though better) didn’t report the same details as my older one. Long story short – the woman at the other end of the line couldn’t/wouldn’t place the work order. I listened to them argue a bit, back and forth (and the tech guy was, again, very polite). After he hung up, he said he’d just place the order in himself. He also said that he’d “get into some trouble,” but that he saw the errors… and the tap outside needed to go.

As of now, I haven’t experienced another outage since we set up the new modem. I’ll try to follow up in a few days to see about the “INR TIcket” for the tap outside, but if I don’t experience any more problems… it’s possible that the modem was the problem all along.

Crossing my fingers and hoping this newer bit of hardware solves our problems. I’m much happier with the service I received this time around from AT&T, and really appreciated the time and insight from the tech that came to my place. It’s just a shame that these AT&T-related incidents always seem to have a part one and a part two.

// EDIT: As of Sunday evening (10/16) and this morning, the problem has returned. In fact, it’s even more frequent… and now drops connection every 8-10 seconds, for about 5 seconds at a time. The up side is that I no longer have to disconnect/reconnect Airport… but the connectivity is just blipping in and out with seemingly greater frequency.

Part III to come, I guess.

Related:
The AT&T Technician That Claims To Have Entered My Home
Setting Up Internet Service With AT&T U-Verse, Part 1
Setting Up Internet Service With AT&T U-Verse, Part 2