Why 48 hr delay in service?call

[ItinerantRick]

My FTTN went down this morning. Clearly an AT&T issue as modem cannot connect and all components from modem out are AT&T. The part that is chafing me is the earliest they can come and look is on 24 hours and I need to lose at least a half day of work to accommodate this lack of service.

What is the SLA Sonic has with AT&T? Apparently it is not a good deal for Sonic users if there is a minimum 48 hr response time and loss of pay.

Re-thinking Sonic if they cannot get better than this. Unacceptsble!

[mike.perlas]

Our residential services are best effort and doesn't come with an SLA. If you are looking for an SLA, we do have Enterprise Business available. Sorry to hear your FTTN is having trouble. Repair time is subject to workload. Thanks for your understanding!

[itinerantrick]

Mike, Please read messages before replying. Bad form to reply to your supposed interpretation rather than the question that was posed. I asked what Sonic's SLA with AT&T was, not what Sonic's SLA to me was. Question still stands.

Dane markets and hypes Sonic at the alternative to the duopoly. At this point, from my perspective as a long time customer, Sonic has morphed into just another reseller with no compelling draw. We get the same overbloated price for a specific level of service as with AT&T, we get the same crappy reliability as with AT&T, and this issue shows we are getting the same terrible customer service as with AT&T. So what is the reason to stay with Sonic? Why has my cost gone up 20% in 21 months but the level of service gone down? I hate the duopoly, but Sonic does not seem to understand the market (Internet is basically a necessity in the Bay Area for most) and seems to have lost its concept of customer service.

[leongcpa]

"I hate the duopoly, but Sonic does not seem to understand the market (Internet is basically a necessity in the Bay Area for most) and seems to have lost its concept of customer service."

This is my perspective, as well. I used to be a big Sonic fan, and am probably personally responsible for 5-10 people signing up with Sonic. Now, my perspective is: Sonic is just another ISP with poor customer service.

[pockyken007]

"I hate the duopoly, but Sonic does not seem to understand the market (Internet is basically a necessity in the Bay Area for most) and seems to have lost its concept of customer service."

This is my perspective, as well. I used to be a big Sonic fan, and am probably personally responsible for 5-10 people signing up with Sonic. Now, my perspective is: Sonic is just another ISP with poor customer service.

You all complain about customer service , I am yet to experience this terribad customer service from SONIC , every time I called them my issue got resolved within 1 phone call for less technical issues and 24 hrs for dispatch required issues ... that's not bad at all .

[mike.perlas]

I apologize! I misread your question. I can't discuss the contract we have with them. However, regardless it is still a best effort service as an end result.

[itinerantrick]

Update: AT&T showed up, 35 minutes late (truck was parked around the corner for 45 minutes before he came up, so not sure why the delay unless wanting to mess with me). Within 10 minutes he had the same diagnosis I had made 50 hours earlier, and had told the Sonic support person: issue was a line problem upstream. The only additional info AT&T could provide was approximate location (595' from MPOE) as he had a meter for a loop test.

At that point another ticket had to be created for someone to repair the line. Estimated time to arrival: 1 hr. Real time to arrival: 5.5 hours. A whole day lost, and revenue lost, for a problem I had diagnosed over 2 days earlier and which did not in fact need my presence. This is a failure in the system: why force customers to lose time from work, and $$$, for simple issues that have already been diagnosed and do not need the customer to be present to fix?

Full disclosure: I *know* what I am talking about. I have found network and storage companies. I can diagnose issues in my sleep. I now get paid to analyze and debug complex distributed computing issues. When I diagnosed the issue as an upstream line break on Sunday morning I was not your average wannabe home networker. In 1995 my employer at the time, the State of California, charged companies $200/hour for my time to diagnose this type of problem; adjust for inflation. This issue *should* have been fixed 55 hours earlier than it was, except for the BS of not accepting my diagnosis and wanting a service dispatch. In the short run, Sonic has to fix this or they are DEAD.

And that brings me to my follow on complaint; it is with AT&T but since my point of contact is Sonic here it is. The AT&T router I am force to use by AT&T/Sonic is a POS based on 30 year old technology. Worse, it prevents me from making changes to critical, key settings. When my line was 'repaired', the router connected but networking was not 'working' for any device, including the GrandStream device Sonic requires for a phone line and has locked. It took me only a few minutes to determine that networking was working, but DNS resolution was failing. The AT&T modem hard-codes the DHCP DNS information to its own address and tries to proxy DNS for the network behind it. If it fails, as it did yesterday, you are dead in the proverbial water unless you can circumvent this BS. Some devices allowed custom DNS settings, and that worked. But others, including the Sonic-locked GrandStream, do not permit custom DNS settings so they were unusable. I had to turn the AT&T router into a glorified DSL modem and use my ASUS to handle all the real work. Poor folks who cannot figure this out and work around this crap. Sonic needs to use influence to get AT&T to either use a modern router, fix their broken DNS, and/or replace the router with a DSL modem/real router.

In the interim, my holding out for Google Fiber (blocked by AT&T/Comcast in our area) is over. Wishing WaveBroadBand would come just a bit further south. But this experience has reinforced that Sonic has degraded into a C class re-seller with no compelling story. Sorry Dane.

[pockyken007]

Update: AT&T showed up, 35 minutes late (truck was parked around the corner for 45 minutes before he came up, so not sure why the delay unless wanting to mess with me). Within 10 minutes he had the same diagnosis I had made 50 hours earlier, and had told the Sonic support person: issue was a line problem upstream. The only additional info AT&T could provide was approximate location (595' from MPOE) as he had a meter for a loop test.

At that point another ticket had to be created for someone to repair the line. Estimated time to arrival: 1 hr. Real time to arrival: 5.5 hours. A whole day lost, and revenue lost, for a problem I had diagnosed over 2 days earlier and which did not in fact need my presence. This is a failure in the system: why force customers to lose time from work, and $$$, for simple issues that have already been diagnosed and do not need the customer to be present to fix?

Full disclosure: I *know* what I am talking about. I have found network and storage companies. I can diagnose issues in my sleep. I now get paid to analyze and debug complex distributed computing issues. When I diagnosed the issue as an upstream line break on Sunday morning I was not your average wannabe home networker. In 1995 my employer at the time, the State of California, charged companies $200/hour for my time to diagnose this type of problem; adjust for inflation. This issue *should* have been fixed 55 hours earlier than it was, except for the BS of not accepting my diagnosis and wanting a service dispatch. In the short run, Sonic has to fix this or they are DEAD.

And that brings me to my follow on complaint; it is with AT&T but since my point of contact is Sonic here it is. The AT&T router I am force to use by AT&T/Sonic is a POS based on 30 year old technology. Worse, it prevents me from making changes to critical, key settings. When my line was 'repaired', the router connected but networking was not 'working' for any device, including the GrandStream device Sonic requires for a phone line and has locked. It took me only a few minutes to determine that networking was working, but DNS resolution was failing. The AT&T modem hard-codes the DHCP DNS information to its own address and tries to proxy DNS for the network behind it. If it fails, as it did yesterday, you are dead in the proverbial water unless you can circumvent this BS. Some devices allowed custom DNS settings, and that worked. But others, including the Sonic-locked GrandStream, do not permit custom DNS settings so they were unusable. I had to turn the AT&T router into a glorified DSL modem and use my ASUS to handle all the real work. Poor folks who cannot figure this out and work around this crap. Sonic needs to use influence to get AT&T to either use a modern router, fix their broken DNS, and/or replace the router with a DSL modem/real router.

In the interim, my holding out for Google Fiber (blocked by AT&T/Comcast in our area) is over. Wishing WaveBroadBand would come just a bit further south. But this experience has reinforced that Sonic has degraded into a C class re-seller with no compelling story. Sorry Dane.

Do you realize how many people does sonic tech support get that " know " what they are talking about ? heck I was at an apple store the other day and a lady with 10 year old mac was asking the tech guy there why her comp was slow ... the tech tried to explain to her for almost an hour that yes they can upgrade some parts of her old computer to make it faster but it would be more cost effective to just get new machine and she kept on telling him that her computer just needed some maintenance because she " KNEW " computers so yeah ... pardon me when I say that unless you are speaking to tier 2 or 3 support and they can actually determine that you know your stuff you will be treated like everybody else by any tech support person ... aka " did you turn it off and on again ? "

[danielg4]

What Sonic believes or doesn't believe when FTTN customers have problems is simply not an issue. AT&T are the ones who need to see for themselves what is going on, for which they don't even have the most basic trust in skilled diagnosis by Sonic, much less the end customer.

[pockyken007]

What Sonic believes or doesn't believe when FTTN customers have problems is simply not an issue. AT&T are the ones who need to see for themselves what is going on, for which they don't even have the most basic trust in skilled diagnosis by Sonic, much less the end customer.

While I agree the partnership between sonic and ATT i snot ideal in terms of support and there is a lot that needs to be worked out before this relationship is at the level that sonic support is on their own lines ( fiber for example ) it's a necessary evil of doing business ... people complained they were sick and tired of slow DSL speeds so sonic did the next best thing and signed a contract with the devil itself to deliver FTTN where it's available so that people can get at least 20-50 mbps speeds whereas before they were getting 1-5 mbps ... sadly with that contract came the issue of dual customer service when it comes to issues ... you call sonic , sonic calls ATT , ATT responds to an issue ( or not ) and so go on ... it's not a perfect solution but it is a solution for many people who are nowhere near seeing fiber anytime soon and were stuck on old school DSL copper ...