Service Outage – User Submission by John
January 20th, 2010 | by Admin |Hi,
A couple of weeks ago, my “clear” service went down on a Saturday. I was glad the support line was still open. They looked and looked and determine one of the “towers” was down. They told me there was 6 other towers in my location – lots of people where I live. They asked me to move my modem around but nothing worked. They said there is an issue and they are working on it.
I called on Sunday, during the day. Asked what the status was. They said they were working on it. I asked what the issue was. They said they don’t know. They have not heard from the local support area. I asked if anyone worked on weekends. They could not answer. All they said was they have not heard back from Seattle yet. I asked if I could speak with a supervisor. They said none were in the building, all gone. They said someone would call me back. I called again on Sunday about 8 hours later, asking for a status. They said they are still working on it. I asked how do they know they cannot tell me what the issue is and when it would be fixed or if anyone was working on it. They could not answer the question.
Monday, still down. I called. They said they are working on it and all they can see is that they have a tower down. All they can tell is the tower is not up. I called 8 hours later on Monday. I finally talked to a supervisor. The supervisor said “we are aware of the problem and are working on it”. He said “company policy is to not tell customers what the problem is” and be assured it is being worked on. The supervisor would not tell me when it would be fixed, what the issue is, or if someone was truely working on the problem.
Tuesday, it finally was working. I think several things. I think that they were upgrading the towers and decided to take service away. I also think they do not have any ‘fault tolerance’ in their towers. Thus, if one goes out, you are out of luck. I also think they do not have people working on weekends, thus, if there is an issue your are out of luck. I would NOT use their internet service for anything critical like your PHONE or business.
I was lucky enough to find an unsecured wireless for a couple of days – careful what I did and where I went.
This all occurer AFTER they upgraded my modem to Clear – 4G. When they did, the network speed finally was what I subscribed to. Before, it was VERY VERY VERY slow. It is faster. I can prove it by the www.speedtest.net I did before and after. Also, I think when I got my new modem I noticed that my server was in Georgia, verified from speedtest.net. However, after the “outage”, it is now in Seattle. This realy makes me believe that they purposely took out the old towers and replace them. I think a bean counter determined the cost of complaints and issues and decided to do this without providing 99.999% uptime.
I have 6 months left on my contract and will not renew. I also manage 3 other contracts – not under my name – so they will be loosing that business as well.
They said they will credit my account for the days lost, however, that is not much $. It is more of the bad service and attitude of this company that really makes me upset.