Ohio resident John Sopko had to go a month without his AT&T fixed wireless Internet service because the company repeatedly failed to diagnose and fix the problem, the Akron Beacon Journal reported today. AT&T finally figured out this week that the antenna on Sopko’s roof was broken and had to be replaced, but not until after a parade of support calls and technician visits.
Sopko said he isn’t a big Internet user but that his girlfriend and her 17-year-old son are. The son has “been at his grandmother’s since four days after [the outage] started because he needs it for school,” Sopko said. Sopko’s house is either in or near an area where AT&T received US government funding to deploy service.
Sopko’s service stopped working on October 30. Rebooting the modem did nothing, so he called AT&T’s service phone number and “followed directions to reboot the system.” That again did nothing, so AT&T sent a technician to his home in Akron, but the tech just repeated the steps that Sopko had already taken, according to the report:
“He went and turned everything off and plugged it back in,” Sopko said. Same result—no connection.
AT&T sent out a second technician, on Nov. 8. “He did the same thing,” Sopko said. “He said it was an engineering problem and was going to send an email.”
More frustration, no explanation from AT&T
Sopko didn’t hear back from AT&T, so he called the company again a couple of days after the second technician visit, the Beacon Journal article said. “They said they were ‘troubleshooting’ and said it would be back up in a couple of hours,” he told the newspaper.
The service did not come back online within a couple of hours, and Sopko said he had to “chase them down” again because AT&T didn’t call him back. He was eventually able to schedule a technician appointment for November 23. But on that day, “he received another text, confirming an appointment for Nov. 26. A text on Nov. 26 confirmed an appointment for 2 pm to 4 pm. Sopko said he may not have responded in time to that text, so a new appointment was set for Dec. 3,” the newspaper reported.
The Beacon Journal report continued:
Sopko called the service line again on Nov. 26, talking to a customer representative. “I don’t want to be mean to you,” he told the representative. “But this has been going on for 28 days now. Why?”
The representative couldn’t give a solid answer, which frustrated Sopko even more. “I’m buying a product that I can’t use,” he said. “Tell me lightning hit a tower; tell me something.”
AT&T’s government funding
Finally, Sopko was contacted on Tuesday of this week by an AT&T rep, and the company sent what Sopko called a “more advanced technician” to his house on Wednesday. The technician tested the antenna, found it wasn’t working, and replaced it.
“That ‘antenna’ was a fixed wireless unit the company had installed about a year and a half before. The units are primarily used in rural areas where cable lines aren’t in place,” the Beacon Journal noted.
Ohio is one of 18 states where AT&T received $428 million from the Federal Communications Commission per year for seven years starting in 2015 to deploy 10Mbps Internet using fixed wireless technology to 1.1 million homes and small businesses. It’s not clear whether Sopko’s home is counted in that deployment, but his address on East Voris Street is very close to other Akron properties where the FCC map shows subsidized deployment by AT&T.
AT&T still trying to “determine what happened”
Sopko “received a bill on Tuesday for a month’s service he didn’t get” but later received bill credits “and a gift card for his troubles,” the Beacon Journal reported. AT&T told the newspaper that “our technicians restored Mr. Sopko’s Internet service and he is satisfied.”
We asked AT&T for an explanation of why it took a month to diagnose and fix the problem. The company didn’t explain but said it is looking into the matter.
“Clearly, this is not an acceptable customer experience and did not meet our expectations for how we serve our customers,” AT&T told Ars today. “We have apologized to Mr. Sopko and credited his account. We are reviewing this case to determine what happened and to prevent it from happening again.”