 Review by DrStrange 
UPDATED: 1.6 years ago
member for 8.3 years, 3384 visits, last login: a few hours ago
 West Hartford,Hartford,CT
 $49 per month (month by month)
 about 45 days
 Southern New England Telephone
 "Reliable. Rock-solid for 6 and a half years"
 "Outsourced tech support: Given 4 weeks, they couldn't fix a misplaced wire that resulted from a hardware migration at the CO."
 "It's fine if it works 'out of the box'. Don't expect much of anything from tech support."
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Install Co-ordination:
Connection reliability:
Tech Support:
Services:
Value for money:
(ratings match consensus)
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I ordered Earthlink DSL in July, 2001. It took about seven weeks to get up and running due to poor co-operation between Earthlink, Covad and SNET. I had to order the service on my second phone line when they couldn't get it to work on the first line. Once they got it running, it was flawless at 1536/384 and later 3008/384 [except for 51-hour outage caused by 9/11 that certainly wasn't their fault] until 2/1 of this year. On 2/1 the connection inexplicably went dead. I called India tech support and they ripped and rebuilt the PVC to no avail. A bit of asking around behind the scenes yielded the probable cause: There was a hardware migration from AT&T to Covad splitters [forced on Covad by AT&T] at my CO on 2/1. Someone apparently didn't re-connect my DSL correctly to my phone line during the migration. I forwarded this information to India tech support and they basically ignored me. They insisted [on 2/5] that the problem was (1) a bad modem [I had three working modems at the time], then (2) bad inside wiring [although I told them I had no sync at the NID, they had AT&T send a line tech to my house [2/12]. The line tech found [obviously] nothing wrong. India tech support's next excuse was that the line had suddenly, magically become 'technically not feasible' [3/3]. I responded by cancelling Earthlink. I changed my service plan to 'Premium E-mail' with no Internet access. For $5 a month or $49.90 a year, Earthlink will provide five e-mail accounts.
The 'technically not feasible' line is now running at 6016/768 [3/15] with a 19dB downstream margin. I switched to another Covad partner [reviewed separately] and Covad had the connection up and running nine days [3/15] after Earthlink was 'disconnected' [3/6; note: they'll try and keep the line 'connected' for up to a month unless pressed to disconnect immediately; the disconnect should take a week or less; mine was done in three days].
Earthlink used to have some first-class techs working in support. They also had an online presence at this site, which saved many customers from switching as I was ultimately forced to do. These operations have been entirely outsourced [and the online presence here is no more]. A few of the techs in India are competent, but the rest are script-readers. Earthlink's ill-conceived efforts at cost control have rendered its tech support operation useless for anything beyond common user errors, bad modems and circuit rebuilds.
I won't say 'stay away', but I will say 'be warned'. If you order and everything works, just pray to all that's holy that it stays that way. If it doesn't work [or it stops working] and they can't fix it on the first or second try, cancel and go elsewhere.
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EarthLink
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