I just cancelled my Earthlink accounts (one for general internet access, one for DSL). I’ve had the DSL account for five years and the general account for… uh… ten years, maybe? I opened it long enough ago that my email address was a single dictionary word. It’s a little odd to no longer have that as my default email address, but I’ll get used to it.
There were several reasons. One was that the quality of their customer support declined rather sharply when they outsourced the operation to India. Another was that I discovered that Comcast’s cable-modem service costs the same as Earthlink’s DSL service and is dramatically faster. (Suddenly YouTube makes sense. At DSL speeds all of the videos are blurry and not terribly fun to watch; at cable speeds they look like local video files.)
The big reason, though, was that around the beginning of September they had a massive DNS screw-up that prevented me–and all of their other customers, I think–from reaching my websites, which are hosted by Lunarpages, and from reaching Lunarpages itself. Not being able to get to your own commercial website is a Bad Thing. You can’t take orders, you can’t handle customer correspondence, you can’t do anything.
At first I assumed the problem was with Lunarpages, but after six or seven hours I managed to deduce that it was actually Earthlink’s issue. Earthlink was no help at all with this deduction. The best they could do was to say [in badly punctuated English] that their “Engineers were facing the issue” and that it would be resolved in a couple of hours, and suggested that I use a proxy server in the mean time. The proxy service they pointed me towards put up a series of banner ads and then crashed the chat window I was using to talk to Earthlink. It also wasn’t any use for establishing a secure connection to the admin section of my website.
Meanwhile I had started an email conversation with Lunarpages, who were considerably more helpful, even after it was established that it wasn’t their problem. They pointed me towards a very handy PC utility called TreeWalkDNS. It acts as a local DNS server and hence circumvented the Earthlink failure. That put me back in touch with my sites. The support folks at Lunarpages have always been very helpful on the occasions I’ve contacted them, but that day they really rose to the occasion.
Once that was sorted out I started investigating options for a different ISP. Comcast turned out to be the apparent best choice here, so I called them up and established that they would indeed sell me internet service without regular TV service. (I don’t even have a TV, so cable TV service wouldn’t do me much good even if I wanted it.) They had an installer here on the next business day and he had the installtion done in an hour or so, despite the fact that my house’s junction box is so old that he didn’t recognize it for what it was and that the other end of the cable was buried underneath the pedestal.
Earthlink never did acknowledge the problem publicly; their network status page on the support section of their site continued to claim that there were no issues with their DNS. This persisted even after a message thread on a Lunarpages forum confirmed that they had admitted to other customers that they knew of the problem, and were handing out new IP addresses for their DNS. So the short version is that they lied to me about the problem. (Shocked I am, yes, shocked.)
So, we ran with Comcast for about three weeks and became convinced that it was reliable enough for our rather steady ‘net usage, and today I called up Earthlink and cancelled. They didn’t seem terribly concerned about retaining my business. When the operator asked what my reason was, I told her that I had several and inquired whether she wanted to hear all of them. Apparently that response wasn’t covered by her script because she went ahead to the next step after a rather nonsensical reply.
Earthlink customer support sucks!
2 years ago when I got divorced, I cancelled my earthlink and had a new account set up in my name only (same address). For the past 2 years I have been calling periodically to get my ex husband’s name off of MY account. Customer service people never speak English, and if they do, they are still never in America and do not know how to help with anything. They simply speak politely and never fix any problem you have. They assure you that your problem is fixed, only to find out nothing was fixed at all.
A year after I tried to set up service in my own name, I moved to a new location. We had had a router for the past 8 years, so they told me they were going to send a free upgraded modem to my new address, give me the promotional new rate for 3 months, and that my new service would be set up right away.
The service never did work properly, the modem wasn’t “free” (they charged me $29.99 to “ship” it by UPS from the same state and it took 2 or 3 weeks to arrive). My new service kept dropping connection, so they gave us some kind of a “fix” that involves redialing up several times a day (even though this is supposed to be DSL service).
The ex husband’s name, passwords, and email address as primary account was STILL on MY account, so I spent another year, until I moved again, trying to get that straightened out. They always told me that the account was straightened out, but it never was.
Recently I moved again, before the end of the annual term, but they said since I was such a long and loyal customer, there would be no charges for any “early cancellation of service before the annual anniversary”. I tried to get the new service ordered (in a new county, new town, new phone number) set up with JUST my account information. They said it was, but when I tried to log into my account that was still supposed to be active until September (I called in June to have this service transferred), I found that they had revived an earlier email address from my ex husband, replaced that as MY primary account, and then finally, after several more calls with “supervisors”, found that they had deleted my account altogether. finally, I just said, “Okay, nevermind – I just want to cancel my service, and do not charge me the penalty fee – I will just pay for the 2 months’ remaining service, but set this to cancel at the end of this annual contract.” I was assured that cancellation was set for Sept 8.
Today I discovered they charged me a “reactivation fee” and an early termination penalty fee ($249). I logged on to this earlier account (guessed my ex husband’s login to it) and found that they have his name and email, but being billed to ME. The only updated information was my cell phone and the address was the one I moved to a year after my divorce. They showed that my cancellation date was in June, and an email sent to this ex husband’s account from Earthlink showed a customer service number to call that doesn’t work.
I used the chat feature to chat with yet ANOTHER customer service person who assured me that both accounts (including the one I was currently logged into and chatting to them with) were BOTH deactivated and that I would not be charged anything further. They assured me that they were aware of the incorrect billing and that it had been waived, that I would not be charged anything more at all, nothing whatsoever. They apologized for the inconvenience.
The trouble with earthlink, besides the outsourcing situation of customer service not knowing the English language or American systems, is that they have supervisors who know nothing more than the customer service, and there is absolutely no way to complain or get in touch with the actual company. One customer service person told me that I was to write to “ceo@earthlink.net” and that would get to the customer complaint section at the corporate office. Another told me that if I need to write to someone, I should write to “support@earthlink.net”, but when you write to that address, all you get is a bounced mail saying that email address is not monitored. Instead, we are to go online and look up faqs or chat “with a friendly customer support representative.”
Is there anyone out there that knows the corporate office and how to actually REALLY contact Earthlink to complain about the shitty service that they have been giving for the past few years? I don’t even expect this is the end of it, even though they sent me a transcript of the chat that assures me 100% everything is cancelled, deactivated, and that I won’t be charged for anything else beyond what I’ve already paid for.
If you get billed again, don’t bother with Earthlink. Just file a complaint with your credit card company and provide the transcript as proof that your card is being charged without your authorization. Bitching at Earthlink is never going to get you anywhere, but chargebacks on their merchant account may eventually get their attention.
Here’s a story for you! I have a customer in Woodside, California who has been with Earthlink for 8 to 10 years, for the last two months she has been getting different speeds with her DSL Modem 24K, 36K, 57L, then jumped to 1.5 Mbps, then down to 150Kbps then got knocked off this has been going on since December 20th 2008. So the customer has been without DSL for 18 days. I talked with the Indians, they talk like they have five potatoes in their mouth always saying they are sorry. I just found out through Executive Research through Earthlink in Georgia that they have a major DNS issue and don’t have any eta as to when it will be fixed. As you can see I gave up dealing with the Indians, I was tired of insulting them on the phone telling them that they should be fired and to dance around the camp fire. I know its the wrong kind of Indian, but I was very frustrated with the whole thing. Anyway, the DNS issue effects California and is a big mess. If you live any where in California, look at another provider. As of 1/16/09 Friday at 2:04 PM they have not fixed this issue. I have spent 19 days on this issue for my customer. I can tell you that Earthlink will loose a lot, and I mean a lot of customers maybe 10,000 to 15,000 customers. I also found out that their DSL Modems they send out are junk my same customer went through three of them. My customer has gone with comcast, I now deal with the Executive Research Department at 1-866-742-2218. This is eastern time in the USA open from 8:am to 5:pm. Press # 0 for the oprator. Use this only as your last resort. They don’t know any technical but can help if you have a ticket number already established. I would recommend that everyone stay away from Earthlink for their ISP. What ever you do, don’t talk with the Indians their stupid people. I told Earthlink Executive Research that what Obama needs to do is tax the corportations that want to out source their service to tax 50%, if they keep their service in the USA only 25%. We need to keep customer service in the USA and not in India. What ever happen to good old customer service?