Toward the beginning of June my EarthLinkStink DSL service went dark. I gave it a day or two and checked into the local coffee shop for wi-fi. Days later it was still dead so I called EL’s technical support and it took them weeks to get it working again.

They told me “there was a problem in my neighborhood since the original date of my problem” which prompts the question why they didn’t notify customers about extended downtime. That statement was an outright lie because their support site said nothing of planned (or otherwise) downtime. I presume the tech was passing the problem along the support chain, customer be damned.

Outsourcing to India, quite frankly, blows. Fortunately, there wasn’t a language barrier or sarcastic techs, rather a mix of things. They’re not sincere when they say “I’m sorry you’re experiencing a problem.” No, you’re not sorry and if you were sorry my service wouldn’t be down for this long. You’d pass me to a supervisor without begging for it.

They follow the troubleshooting script (or flowchart if you will) to a proverbial “T.” If you interject a single word that doesn’t fit the correct response at the right step they simply ignore you. You can say you’re Bill Gates or the designer of the DSL modem and they’ll still tell you to reboot Windows or the modem. They should be checking the circuit on their end first and then put the customer through hoops.

Having been down almost a month I was offered nothing for my time. That’s not entirely true, I was told to call the billing department once I was back on-line and they’d credit me. No, no, no you should automatically be doing it. I’ve called in five times and done with it.

The icing on the cake was when my DSL recovered and I had trouble with my router’s PPPoE. It turns out I needed to re-enable the modem’s Bridge Mode but the tech support rep simply said “we don’t support routers, good bye.” She didn’t even offer to help although EL’s web support system includes instructions on Bridge mode specifically for people with routers.

My ratings of EarthStink on a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being the best:

1. Hold time: 7
2. Courteous: 8
3. Sincere: 1
4. Expertise: 1
5. Proactive: 1
6. Follow-up: 5
7. Quick resolution: 1
8. Average rating: 3.4

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