The Digital Bridge to My Nowhere

Among the many things for which I was thankful this past Thursday was finally getting DSL activated at my new residence. It's certainly not on the same level as water or electric service, but having Internet access at home has become closer to being a highly desirable amenity. It took much longer than I expected, but now my information island is connected.

I was a longtime DSL and home phone customer with AT&T (and SBC before that) and was very satisfied with the service. The small handful of you that actually follow this blog might recall that I was even able to blog through the thankfully brief electrical outage during Hurricane Ike.

So a full month before I moved in, I placed an online order on the AT&T website asking that I get similar service here. The day before I moved in, an AT&T tech called me from the site to confirm that I had dialtone and my new phone number was ready. On the same day, my old phone line lost dialtone and my DSL modem lost signal. At least the disconnect portion of the order went as planned.

I had asked the phone installation tech about the new DSL service -- which I had also requested for my move-in day -- and he advised that it would be handled separately. Well, I was busy with other things as one might expect, so I let this slip for a few days. When I did finally get around to pursuing help, AT&T's customer service gave me obtuse answers like these:

• The new phone number wasn't mine. (What?)
• I needed to place an order for DSL. (But I did?)
• I had an invalid order number (I can clearly read what I printed out from AT&T's own website.)
• DSL wasn't available for my new phone number. (Hmmmm.)
• DSL was available for my new address. (Double-hmmmm.)

Finally after receiving a bill for a new month of service at my old address, I -- with the help of an astute customer service person at AT&T -- finally figured out that the information system being used by customer service had never properly marked my old service as terminated. Because I had placed a move order, that hangup prevented the DSL order from proceeding on my new number. This apparently is not a rare problem for this system, but once that error was cleared, I was cleared for DSL on my new number. So three-and-a-half weeks past my original move-in date, I was finally able to get my new home LAN hooked up to the outside world.

For at least the time being, then, I recommend that AT&T customers who are moving not, under any circumstances use the Move My Services link on the AT&T website. Make two separate orders -- one to disconnect service at the old address, and one to activate service at the new one. This way, if there is an issue on one of the orders, it will not interfere with the other.

Now it's time for me to post a couple back-dated TXU Energy Turkey Trot and RNRSA race reports.