duffy wrote...
"Earthlink has one of the worst support there is"
absolutely untrue... ELNK has award winning tech support...
"the hold time is normally 30 to 40 minutes."
i'm sure the hold time is not that long 24/7... maybe at peak times of the day though... with almost 5 million customers they are doing the best they can to get more reps on the phones but they can't just grab people from off the street and throw them on the phones...
finding quality reps and providing quality training takes a little time... also, keep in mind that you may be waiting on hold due to other users who may not be as computer literate as you and are having difficulty getting walked through their fix...
you haven't lived until you've spent 15 minutes trying to teach someone over the phone how to right click...
the hold times will go down eventually...
"Like most support people, their specialty is finger pointing, buck passing, or plain stupidity."
it's pretty clear that you know absolutely nothing about how computers & telecommunications work...
over 90% of all customer tech support calls are due to something messed up on the user's pc, whether it be a corrupted file, a crappy win-modem with old drivers, a norton update that re-writes the email client settings, etc...
if the problem is on ELNKs side due to hardware failure or broken fiber, etc, they will tell you right up front and announce such problems on their phone system and usenet...
the quality of your ISP service depends upon a million things, from your OS and it's communications files to your modem, to it's drivers & settings, through your telco & telco lines, through your ISP, through all the routers from all the OPNs that make up the internet and finally to the destination server...
one little problem with any of these anywhere along the chain and people instantly blame their ISP... most of the time it's something on their system... sometimes there is a router down somewhere or a fiber cut... files get corrupted... computers crash... settings get changed... actually, it's a miracle that we even have an internet considering everything it takes to keep it up and running...
big tip...
keep your OS healthy... scan disk and defrag often...
don't install/use any unnecessary software, that includes ISP software, you don't need that crap, connect using DUN ( dial up networking ) that is the best way... you double click your browser or email client of choice and bam... it opens and connects you to the internet... your ISP tech support rep can walk you through setting this up...
do you have a crappy win-modem with a lucent or rockwell chipset or a real full hardware modem like a US Robotics... if you have a win-modem, realize the limitations of them and constanly keep your drivers updated and settings adjusted properly... better yet, throw away that $5 piece of crap and get yourself a $100 USR full hardware modem... ( or go broadband via DSL, satellite or cable ) there are people with $2000 pcs that have a $5 win modem in them and then they bitch about their connections dropping...
and finally...
Core Values & Beliefs...
http://www.earthlink.net/about/ourvalues/cvb/index.html
Your Internet Bill of Rights...
http://rights.earthlink.net/