On December 1, I received this message and this message in reponse to messages which I had sent to the "president's office" address on Flashcom's web site. As might be imagined, these did not come from Flashcom's president. Worse, the guy who responded did so nearly a week after I sent the message and replied in HTML. (Which is a prime example of Flashcom's "not getting it"...a normal, intelligent person would not send an HTML message in reply to a complaint about HTML mail...but I digress.
On the evening of December 1, I began to consider some alternative DSL options. My old Flashcom line had still not been disconnected (and it is still up on 12/5 as I type this), and so I perused the web pages of Speakeasy.net, which appears to be the most clueful national DSL provider. After a phone call to Covad and another to Speakeasy, I learned that they now offer service in my area (which they did not offer when I was first looking into DSL in September).
Under normal circumstances, it should be a fairly easy procedure to switch from one ISP which uses Covad (the CLEC which provides the lines) to another. The stumbling block in this case is that the old ISP must provide a so-called "ISP switch form" to Covad in order to release the line pair and allow it to be subleased to the new ISP. Since Flashcom was closed on weekends, I could do little more than post this message to the Usenet group comp.dcom.xdsl. Basically, I stated this fact, along with the interesting fact that, contrary to what I had been told by Flashcom, I have no need to return my SDSL router to them, since I essentially own it (Flashcom bought it from Covad, then re-sold it to me and should be billing me $250 for it; this $250 cost will be refunced by a Covad rebate sent to the end-user). I found it somewhat curious that Flashcom would have asked for me to return it.
Another interesting tidbit that I learned from my conversation with a helpful lady at Covad was that Covad had not yet received the cancel order for my line and that, once they receive the cancel order, they will drop the line within the day. This is significant, since a) Flashcom kept insisting that the cancellation delay is due to the CLEC (which is apparently wrong) and b) the ISP switch form has to be completed before the line drops. At this point I sent an email message to the person who had responded earlier to my complaint which I sent to the "president of Flashcom" address on their web site.
On Monday, I called Flashcom twice to ask about getting this form completed and submitted. After waiting on hold for fifteen minutes, I spoke to one person who told me that this could be done and to send email to <cancel_request@flashcom.com>, which bounced as undeliverable. I called again and, after several unsuccessful attempts to get in the hold queue (they had a message which said "due to an unusually heavy call volume, we will be unable to process your call at this time" and then dropped the line), I finally got into the queue and waited for nearly 30 minutes. The person on the other end could not explain why I was given incorrect information and proceeded to tell me that Flashcom's official policy on ISP switch forms is "we don't do that." I asked why not, and was told that he didn't know.
After several more questions, I was able to (for the first time) speak with a supervisor named Patrick something or other (I didn't get the last name). He was very rude and insisted that "your line has already been cancelled" and said that there was nothing that they could do. When I told him that Covad doesn't agree with this, he kept repeating that "we have a policy against ISP switches." When I asked for written documentation of this policy, he wanted to know why I wanted this and outright refused to provide it. When I asked for the reasoning behind this, he again asked why I wanted this and would not accept any answer. He was not the first unhelpful Flashcom employee with whom I had spoken, but he was definitely the first one who was downright rude. He basically stated that I was currently getting free service and acted as if this was somehow my own fault.
Obviously upset by this, I posted this somewhat whiny message to comp.dcom.xdsl. I received several sympathetic responses from customers in similar situations.
Later on December 4, I also received this email response (it was in HTML, but I got tired of posting HTML junk email messages here) from the president's office guy, which basically told me that they don't do ISP switches and that I have no means of recourse.
Later that day, I spoke with someone named Brian at Speakeasy, who was very helpful and confirmed that there were many ex-Flashcom customers in my position at this point and that Covad-customer ISPs are not required to provide the switch forms, but can do so if they want. He explained that my only hope is if Covad decides to cut off all Flashcom customers (due to Flashcom's delinquency on Covad bills) before my line drops, at which time I would be able to switch easily.
On December 5, I sent this attempt at a polite reply to this person at Flashcom's president's office. I don't expect him to reply in a helpful manner at all, but we'll see.
Woo-hoo!!!
On December 6, I finally got Flashcom to issue the ISP-switch form. This took lots of time on the phone, but I've summarized it in a usenet post (see below)....hopefully Speakeasy will be better:
Path: news.panix.com!not-for-mail From: snorwood@redballoon.net (Scott Norwood) Newsgroups: comp.dcom.xdsl Subject: No more Flashcom woes! Date: 7 Dec 2000 00:24:08 GMT Organization: Society for World Domination Lines: 59 Message-ID: <90mlb8$pe$1@news.panix.com> Reply-To: snorwood@redballoon.net NNTP-Posting-Host: panix2.panix.com X-Trace: news.panix.com 976148648 814 166.84.0.227 (7 Dec 2000 00:24:08 GMT) X-Complaints-To: abuse@panix.com NNTP-Posting-Date: 7 Dec 2000 00:24:08 GMT X-Newsreader: trn 4.0-test74 (May 26, 2000) Originator: snorwood@panix.com (Scott Norwood) Xref: news.panix.com comp.dcom.xdsl:101395 I never thought the day would come, but... I got Flashcom to provide me with an ISP-switch form for Covad! Woo-hoo! This process required about two hours of my time and countless phone calls, as I spent quite a bit of time leaving voicemail messages for random people at Flashcom in hopes that one of them might actually be able to do something to help me. Amazingly, I learned that there actually _are_ some helpful employees at Flashcom, although they are vastly outnumbered by the clueless and the unhelpful. Tips for trying to get in touch with Flashcom if you have been mistreated by them and are tired of the usual "we're too busy to help you right now, so we'll hang up on you instead" message that one gets when calling the customer-service line: - the contact information on the web site is totally useless; if you want to talk to a human, call 714-799-2400, which is apparently an "unlisted" number that even Covad apparently doesn't know about; once the operator answers, beg and plead to not be put in the regular customer-service queue that goes nowhere...I had to call back three times in order to convince her that the customer-service line just disconnects the caller without even leaving the option to wait in a 'hold' queue - email doesn't work for support it's too easy for them to ignore; when they actually _do_ respond, it's guaranteed to be in some sort of MS- bungled variant of HTML (for very broad definitions of "HTML") - leaving voicemail for random people in the company is time consuming but might be effective - despite the fact that there's a company policy against granting ISP switch forms, exceptions apparently can be made, at least for others who have been seriously mistreated by the ISP - don't bother calling Covad; they actually do answer their phones, but can't do much on their own - if anyone at Flashcom actually returns your call, consider it to be a minor miracle - I never had to try sending registered letters, so I don't know whether or not that would be an effective communications tool I can count the list of helpful people at Flashcom (at least the ones to whom I have spoken) on one hand: Belinda Hall, Kim Western, and some guy named Jeremy all come to mind. Pretty much everyone else was either too clueless or too powerless to do anything, although some tried to be helpful. A supervisor named Patrick was downright rude. Anyway, I'm switching to Speakeasy tomorrow and we'll see how that switch goes...if they're as good as their reputation, I won't be posting these long rants anymore.