Goodbye Earthlink
Update: Ha ha ha ha! Earthlink cuts half its staff!
I did it! I finally did it!
When I originally signed up for Earthlink, I knew about their legendary technical support service. Legendarily bad, that is. But the deal was too good: 6M dsl, phone, unlimited long distance, cheap… Granted, I never could log in to the Usenet newsfeeds, but it was indeed fast. Their tech support ran me in circles for weeks, and eventually I gave up completely on Usenet. But, it was fast and cheap, and I was reasonably happy.
Then, I moved to a new location where this package was not available. Terrified by the thought of a $149 early termination fee, I allowed my contract to be extended to 12 months and downgraded to 160k DSL. Aaaaugh! Soooo Slooooow!
After updating my billing information, I started getting a monthly email “warning” me that my credit card was about to expire, but it still worked. Earthlink’s people seemed unable to fix this, so I just deleted the email every month. But, when I got home last night, my DSL was not working. Ugh. After a half hour on hold (during which I played quite a lot of Super Swing Golf), the “technician” on the other end informed me that my account was “inactive”, and transferred me to the billing department.
The billing department was closed for the night.
Today, the billing department and the web interface both inform me that my account is active and up to date. Duh! The billing department helpfully suggests that I use the free 30 day trial of Norton Antivirus, and helpfully recommends that I install all of the Earthlink bundled software on my windows PC. Somehow I don’t think either of those things is going to help. Enough! Enough of the second worst phone support in the world. (SBC still holds first place.) Enough of paying slightly more for one tenth of the bandwidth! It’s already not working, so what better time to switch?
I won’t relate the entire Saga Of The Termination Of My Earthlink Service, because it is epic. I recall explaining several times that, yes, it’s worth $149 US to terminate my service now, even though I only have 35 days left in my contract. Yes, I did leap for joy after writing down my confirmation number! Goodbye Earthlink! Hello, Front Range Internet!
April 7th, 2010 at 10:22 am
[…] fees. I couldn’t remember exactly when or whether I paid them a fee, but it turns out that I blogged about Earthlink and their horrible service in 2007. So it looks like I may actually get some of that […]