Last week we had some pretty bad rain and thunderstorms in San Antonio. I don't know if it was due to the weather, but our Internet service went down on Thursday.
This was the first time in almost one year of having U-verse service that this has happened.
I called AT&T U-verse tech support and after trying multiple approaches (unplugging the 2Wire Residential Gateway and the set top boxes) they determined that I needed a service call.
They scheduled me for Friday afternoon between 6:00 and 8:00 PM. Friday afternoon around 5:45, a service tech named Caesar dressed in his blue AT&T - U-verse branded shirt arrived.
Of course, before he entered the house, he had on his blue booties which I've sort of developed an affinity for. (I also noticed that his shirt also had the CWA logo on the sleeve.)
When Caesar arrived, so did my tech support guru, Moses Gomez who helps us at our offices and with occasional tech support at the house. I just got an AppleTV and I needed Moses to help me move the TV and giggle cables behind the rig that Bjorn's originally set up for me.
Hail Ceasar. Oy Moses!
So, having someone named Caesar and Moses in my home put me at great ease. I knew things would get resolved and the Weinkrantz family would be back in the swing of its digital lifestyle.
Ceasar tried the RG. Nada.
Then went outside to check on the NIB. No dice. No Internet.
He then got in his truck and went over to the local DSLAM (pictured on the left) about 300 yards from the house.
Turns out there was a glitch there which he managed to fix (note: I am not that technical...I'm just here to observe the level of service and if the problem gets resolved).
When Caesar returned, he was on a push-to-talk cell phone with his team that was following the repair. He was reading off some numbers and going back and forth to get the IP address to resolve. He also decided to replace the Residential Gateway.
In the conversations going back and forth, there was a spirit of camaraderie and a sense of will that they were going to lick this issue. After several attempts to get my Residential Gateway to show an IP address and having the tech support team going back and forth on the push to talk phone, we were up and going with broadband.
While Caesar was finishing up, Moses and I configured the AppleTV which is way cool and highly recommended. So there we were, three grown men reveling in fixing our toys, all for the sake of stockholder value. (Disclosure: I own a tiny bit of AT&T stock.)
Moses and Caesar finished up at the same time, so we went through one final check to make sure the network configuration was good and that the remotes all work right.
Overall, it was a good service call, and kudos to Ceasar and his team for a job well done. (You too, Moses.)
I think the real service challenge for AT&T is this: when you have a market of 20,000 customers or so that's one thing. Delivering the same quality of service when you scale to several million customers will be the real test.
Photos by Alan Weinkrantz (c) 2007 - All Rights Reserved.
Recent Comments