Problems with Flashcom, a national DSL service provider
Path: news3.best.com!nntp1.ba.best.com!not-for-mail
From: Ed Anderson
Subject: More Flashcom woes (long story)
Newsgroups: ba.internet,comp.dcom.xdsl
Followup-To: comp.dcom.xdsl
Organization: large. http://www.pinch.com
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Date: 13 Jan 1999 03:18:03 GMT
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[ crossposted to ba.internet, please followup-to comp.dcom.xdsl ]
Having seen several requests for a report on Flashcom national DSL
service, and waded through the previous complaints about their lack of
tech support, my problems with the company have gotten to the point that
I'm bailing out, and I feel a need to explain exactly why. Some people
have testified that Flashcom is very responsive. That's true, they're
eager to make a sale. Once they have your order, the story changes.
Before anyone accuses me of not doing my homework, or hopping to the least
expensive provider, I did check them out. I don't need handholding from
tech support or a free web site. They promised unclogged bandwidth, a free
domain name transfer, and extra ip addresses for $2 ea/mo. That would have
cost me an extra $40/mo with PacBell, the only other competitor at that
price point. I heard complaints of email and routing snafus at PBI.
In October, I signed a one year contract with Flashcom for a 384/128k ADSL
feed, using PacBell as the CLEC. After Flashcom lost the paperwork and
then confusing me with another customer, a month later the line was
finally installed. Never any followup from Flashcom with an email address,
just the hand scribbled numbers from when the installer checked the
bridge. Fine. I was up and running immediately, and managed to install a
stable FreeBSD box running NAT within a few days. Bandwidth was always
about 40 kbytes/s while downloading the kernels and packages. Sweet. Ping
latency about 20 ms. Reliability has been pretty good. For the Bay Area,
Flashcom is co-located through well connected AboveNet. I trace most
outages as far as Mae-west. The link to the PacBell DSLAM has been down
twice, both times on the weekend. Flashcom wasn't responding. AboveNet's
24x7 NOC was very helpful, up to Flashcom's equipment. They had the same
phone number for emergency outage that I did, and I fed them a few others
to try. PacBell also has 24x7 response. I opened a trouble ticket, and
resolved the problems on my own. Flashcom never responded the first time.
The second time, they responded after three days.
Mid December, I got a call from Flashcom confirming a new installation for
the next day. I explained that it must be another customer mixup. They
apologized and hung up. The next day, a Pacbell installer showed up. After
he was sent away, Flashcom called to explain that they were changing over
all their Pacbell customers to Covad. They said they were having problems
with reliable bandwidth and PacBell "slamming" thir customers. I told the
Flashcom rep I had full bandwidth, and the failings of their own tech
support. I was told I would get the same service for the same price, but
it required a hardware change to Covad's SDSL. Fine. We agreed to
reschedule the installation for early January.
A few days later, Covad showed up for the previous installation, but
couldn't do anything because Pacbell hadn't prepped a line. I talked with
the rep and found that I had been provisioned for 192k DSL rather than my
current 384k setup.
Just after xmas, Flashcom called and said that my Pacbell feed would go
down at the end of the month. They refused to honor to their contract for
384k, even though Covad offers it. I accepted the change under duress, and
I told them so. Covad arrived again but couldn't complete the installation
because the line hadn't been prepped. A rush order was put in, and I'm
left dangling on December 30 with my service due to be shut off, and no
response from Flashcom on my request that they keep to our contract. I
wrote a letter of complaint to the CTO, president, and sales manager.
There was no response over the next week, so I sent a followup email.
Then I discovered huge charges to by bank account through my phone bill.
After a frustrating search for my phone bills, a call to Pacbell confirmed
that Flashcom had changed ny billing address to *their* address, and that
Pacbell had no authority to take it back. Two of my phone bills had
arrived at Flashcom, marked paid, and they didn't bother to call me.
I called up the Flashcom accounting department, and left a detailed
voicemail. I called the president of the company, Brad Sachs. He vaguely
acknowledged having seen the complaint, and blamed Pacbell for any billing
problems. I noted that they were still advertising the 384k feed
nationally at the rate I'm paying. Brad pulled up his own web site and
told me that they no longer were. He put me on a speakerphone where I was
tagteamed by maybe three people, and told that the back of my contract
states that they can do whatever they want with the service. Funny, the
contract I signed didn't have a back to it. It was an emailed doc file for
1 year contract of 384k service which I printed out, signed, and faxed
back to them. After telling me what a great favor they are doing me, they
told me that they would only offer 192k for the same rate. They told me to
"take it or leave it." I asked if they were willing to debate this online,
and they invited me to try, since they've only been getting good press.
*Click* They blew me off and hung up on me. Still no response from another
voicemail to their accounting dept.
So, here I am. The PUC won't touch it because ISP's are unregulated. I'm
pursuing through the FTC, consumer protection advocates, and small claims
court, if necessary. I've set up a web page with some details. I had
intended to leave the full story out of this post, but the poor little
victim in me just couldn't be contained. There's a copy of my letters at:
http://www.pinch.com/flashcom/
My situation is that I provide a volunteer noncommercial archive of the
Usenet alt.support.skin-diseases.* groups. My disk storage fees have
burgeoned to the point that I could buy a 6 gig drive each month for
what I pay my current provider for 100meg of host space. It's a low
bandwidth but cpu intensive task to serve the database, so a DSL line on
my own FreeBSD box should be just right. It was about to go online when
all this came down.
Well, I was about to believe Matt Dillon's predictions that nobody could
possibly deliver all that DSL bandwidth for a cheap flat rate, until I saw
today's Pacbell press release:
http://www.pacbell.com/products/business/fastrak/dsl/
It's almost unbelievable, and maybe I should hoard the secret. They're
offering full bore DSL, whatever the modem can provide downstream, with a
384k guarantee, for $49/month. In my case that will probably be a full
1.5MB/128k feed!
Flashcom needn't worry about "slamming". I was taking their "leave it"
option anyway. It's a shame, really. It seems like they have a competent
engineering team, if only you can get ahold of them. Their lame web page
has been improving by the day. I even offered some constructive
suggestions about how they could improve the service. They might have been
able to respond better if they had set up a local newsgroup for their
customers. Flashcom says there's one in the works. Good luck, guys. You'll
need it.
I'm sure Pacbell's VAR partners will lower their rates soon, but I've got
to get out of this before I drown.
-- Ed "death of the net predicted, news at eleven" Anderson
Displayed using a script by Ed Anderson
Problems with Flashcom, a national DSL service provider