Once again, I must complain about my ISP - AS&T. I woke up this morning to find myself without Internet access. Do what I would, I was not able to ping anything outside of my ISP’s router. I called them up on the way to work to request service and the earliest they can get somebody out to me is on Thursday - that means at least two full days without access. While this is most definitely not the end of the world, it is extremely inconvenient in that I work from home at night, and I will not be able to work from home. In addition, two days is what I would consider an unacceptable timeframe for a technician to even come out and look at the problem. I will do no less than call up and demand that they pro-rate my payments for this month (of 28 days) to reflect the two days I will be without service. I seriously want to strangle AS&T - I have never been happy with their service and can’t wait for the day when I can cancel their service. Reasons why AS&T is incompetent:

• Poor customer service - did not notify me when they started requiring Basic cable service for cable Internet customers - simply started charging me more. When I called because they started charging me more, they moved my service level back down to Basic limited. This happened for three months until they finally cut off my cable service. When I called, they finally explained the situation to me.
• Poor technical service - I occasionally get what I call a blackholed IP address. If you try to do a diagnostic traceroute to it, it starts bouncing around in the middle, which is indicative of a poorly configured router.
• Poor billing procedures - When AS&T switched to a new billing provider, I received a bill for nearly 4-5 times my normal bill. The reason being was the problem mentioned above (getting charged for Basic) in combination with them not acknowledging my previous two months payment. I got it worked out, but only after many calls.
• Poor internal communication - The technical side does not know what the billing side does not know what the administrative side is doing. This kind of incompetence makes it impossible to get anything done without attempting to coordinate three different viewpoints (if you’re lucky to get the same people).

OK, I’ve ranted enough. [Grrr]