My ISP at my home office is Bellsouth. I use their FastAccess DSL and until yesterday the service had been more than acceptable.

Last night at 11:30 p.m. according to their website, they suffered a network outage. Now that happens, and I understand that things happen. But when I attempted to call Tech Support to find out if it was my end or if there was a system outage, I ended up getting the call dropped, not connected, fast busy, all kinds of issues.

Several times I did get through all of the automated voice prompts to the hold queue only to be summarily dumped. All of these issues combined began to give me the distinct impression that they were indeed having issues. But even when I had identified myself as a DSL customer, I never got an automated announcement that they were indeed experiencing an outage. Instead I just got placed on hold, and dumped.

An automated announcement to the effect that there was an outage in my area, (I had to input my DSL phone number so they knew what area I was in), would have kept me off the phone, and probably reduced the incoming call load.

What was worse, when I finally got a friend that had a different ISP, to go to Bellsouths web site and find the backup dialin numbers for me, I checked their network status page and was greeted with the standard “No Serious Issues” message. Only when I entered my state and city did I get the following:

Subject:	All Cities - Customer Affecting Outage
Problem:	What? Some customers may be unable to connect to the Internet or surf at this time. Who? All customers When? The outage began at 11:30 p.m. EDT on Monday, October 16, 2006. Where? The entire nine-state region that BellSouth Internet Services serves Why? We are currently investigating the cause of the outage. Additional Comments: FastAccess customers that have downloaded our Connection Manager Tool may see a yellow diagonal line, or a red X through the tool. The yellow line indicates which system is affected by the maintenance, and the red X indicates that the customer has no connection. We apologize for any inconvenience, and we thank you for choosing BellSouth Internet Services.
Status:	Open	-- Updated: 10/16/2006 11:29:14 PM

Notice the Where? line? “The entire nine-state region that BellSouth Internet Services serves”

If an outage that affects their entire service area is not a “serious” issue then I am not sure I ever want to experience their idea of a “serious” issue. (Nuclear war perhaps?).

Again, if this notice had been placed prominently on their help and support web page, or even the front page of the network status page it would have reduced calls. I had tried to get to this page via my PPC cell phone but although I could select my state, the city listbox never populated so I could not see this info until I had access to a PC based browser.

Someone at Bellsouth really dropped the ball AND shot themselves in the foot on this one. Over 12 hours later, service was restored.

Cheers,

Robert Porter