Hi --
   
   This morning (~11:30am, EST), I spoke with Mr. Richard Clinton in
   Customer Service in the San Diego office of Flashcom; he was very
   helpful in explaining things and he suggested that I forward some of
   my comments to you.  I currently have two open trouble tickets for
   which I have received no resolution or status information.  If there
   is a more appropriate person for these comments, please feel free to
   forward them to that person.


   First, and most importantly, this level of service to which I have
   committed to a one-year contract has been substantially altered
   since I first signed up for it back in September.  At the time, it
   was being sold as a "business-grade" service (192k SDSL, $99/month,
   one-year commitment).  Part of this service included, at the time,
   24-hour technical support for outages and the like.

   Apparently, this level of technical support has recently been reduced
   to 8am-5pm PST, rather than 24 hours as promised or 5am-6pm PST per
   the Flashcom web site).  This is totally unacceptible for a service
   which is being sold as a "business-grade" product.  Here on the east
   coast, I lose nearly half a business day before I can even talk to
   anyone about service problems.

   Because the level of service provided has been radically changed
   since I first signed up for the one-year contract for the service,
   I would like to request either a permanent rate reduction in order
   to compensate for the reduced level of support or, preferably, the
   ability to cancel the service without incurring the usual penalties
   associated with doing so prior to the end of the contract term.


   Second, I would like to complain about the nonresponsiveness to the
   trouble tickets which I have opened.  It appears that, in many cases,
   your employees are either unwilling or unable (either by lack of
   knowledge or artificial limits imposed by management) to respond
   to trouble tickets.  Additioinally, a 24-hour "expected" (but not
   promised) turnaround time is unacceptible for a service which is
   being sold as "business-grade."  Unfortunately, this fact was not
   made clear to me until long after I had signed up for the service.

   I have not once received an acceptible response to having opened a
   trouble ticket.  I do not think that it is unreasonable for me to
   expect, at the very least, a progress update within the first hour
   or so after issuing a serious trouble ticket, such as for a total or
   intermittent loss of connectivity.  On several occasions, I have had
   my router lose sync for minutes or hours at a time, with no explanation
   and no progress reports for the repair.  Again, this is unacceptible.

   In at least one other case, the trouble ticket as entered into your
   database was blatantly wrong:  I had called to complain about the news
   server (which apparently is outsourced to Supernews) rejecting incoming
   connections on port 119, which anyone who is at all familiar with
   how news works would recognize as a serious problem.  Unfortunately,
   the individual to whom I reported this problem kept insisting that the
   problem was that I had never signed up for a Flashcom email account
   (why should I bother?  I don't need or want one!) and apparently added
   something about "the customer was uncooperative" to the trouble ticket
   instead of attempting to understand what I meant when I explained to
   him that a refused telnet connection on port 119 of the news server
   has nothing to do with anything related to email accounts.

   In yet another case, when I attempted to complain about a loss of
   connectivity, the employee somehow thought that the problem was one of
   my network hubs and could not comprehend the idea that I could ping
   and telnet to the router just fine (which rules out an issue with
   a hub) and that pinging remote hosts while logged into the router
   always failed, thus indicating a network problem.


   Third, I would like to point out that there are certain aspects of
   the customer-service telephone menu system are horribly broken; for
   example, "press 1 to speak to someone" often leads to a busy signal
   rather than the "hold" queue.  This should be fixed.  Further, I have
   usually experienced hold times of 15-30 minutes when calling support.
   Again, this is unacceptible for a "business" service.


   Fourth, the email communication that I have received from Flashcom have
   often been in HTML.  This shows a great disrespect for the customer
   (since not all of us use HTML-capable mail clients) and a general
   lack of understanding about Internet email standards.  The last straw
   was when I received my email invoice in HTML.  _Please_, please, stop
   sending HTML mail to customers!  Most of us find it terribly annoying.
   There is _no_ reason to ever send HTML email to customers, particularly
   the sort of broken, pseudo-HTML code generated by assorted pieces of
   Microsoft software.

   Fifth, I will mention my continued intermittent loss of sync, which
   is an open trouble ticket for which I have received zero information
   on progress.  As a customer of a service which is being sold to
   businesses, I would expect that the least that could be provided
   would be periodic updates about the expected downtime as well as a
   final update explaining what the problem was and what steps have been
   taken to fix it and ensure that it does not happen again.


   Thank you for reading this overly-long message.  I expect that you
   will agree with me that the service with which I have been provided
   has been of poor quality and that my expectation of a rate reduction
   or contract termination without penalty is a reasonable one.

   I realize that there are some internal "issues" at Flashcom relating
   to your support database and such, but, quite frankly, these are
   not my problem, and I would expect that any ISP which is providing
   business-grade services would have enough resources to have a backup
   system (even if it consists of pens and paper) for such an event.
   There are many consumer-oriented ISPs which offer 24/7 support which
   is of high quality.  The fact that Flashcom does not offer this to its
   business customers (after promising it to them when they signed up)
   is problematic.

   I know that this service can actually be very good, as it was for the
   first week or so after it was installed.  If these customer-service
   issues can be worked out, I would be happy to be your customer;
   otherwise, I look forward to cancelling the service as soon as
   possible.

   If you have any further questions, please feel free to call me or
   reply to this.

   - Scott Norwood
     757-565-0894