For some people the internet is a very reliable utility. For others it is a slippery mess. Unfortunately my Mom has fallen into the latter category of late.

A couple of years ago my Mom made the decision to switch from dial-up access to DSL. I was skeptical when she told me she was going with AT&T DSL. Her home phone provider was Verizon. They own the lines in New York City. But someone from AT&T pitched her a home phone plus DSL package with some initially attractive teaser rates. So my Mom signed up for phone and internet with AT&T.

Right from the very beginning I didn’t like the DSL service that AT&T provided. Connecting to the net was always a very slow experience, taking anywhere from two to five minutes just to get the browser to load any new instance of the web browser. Once the browser was opened speeds were just about double dial-up speeds. In other words, AT&T DSL is as slow as molasses!

My Mom seemed pretty happy with the service although over the last two years she had a number of connection problems and always had a difficult time getting any help from AT&T. My Mom is patient. I would have ditched AT&T long ago. To the folks at AT&T my Mom was probably considered a good customer. Their definition of good being someone who takes all of their garbage services and doesn’t cancel when they provide zero support.

I wasn’t surprised when a couple of weeks ago my Mom told me that her AT&T DSL was out. All of a sudden she had no access. Her bills were all paid up. There was just no access. Calls to AT&T yielded zero results. AT&T provides no customer service once you buy their DSL. Have a problem? Too bad! After five days of no service she asked me what to do. I told her to cancel the service and switch to Verizon DSL.

Adding insult to injury in this situation is the fact that the AT&T DSL teaser rate had expired and she was now paying forty dollars a month for the crappiest DSL I’ve ever experienced. And her phone package stunk too. I checked Verizon rates and figured out that my Mom could get better DSL and phone service while saving about forty dollars a month. Since she couldn’t connect to the intenet my Mom called Verizon to get everything switched over. Should be the beginning of a happy ending. Instead Verizon decided to help extend the misery.

Call #1: Verizon is glad to switch phone and internet. No problem. She’ll get a new modem for DSL and instructions in a few days.

Call #2: Five days later after no modem has arrived. “Oh, you need to get your line checked.” states the Verizon customer service rep. My Mom spends almost two hours on the phone. They call her back and tell her the modem is on its way.

Call #3: Six days after the previous call and no modem has arrived. “You need to cancel your AT&T DSL first.” states the Verizon customer service rep. On the first call they told her she needed to do nothing more. Now she needs to call AT&T who rarely answers her calls under normal circumstances. Verizon tells her that once she cancels her AT&T DSL that the line will take four business days to clear. What the hell does that mean? No one seems to know.

The upshot is that after nearly three weeks without internet access and almost six hours on the phone my Mom must call back next Monday to check and see if the line has cleared. If it has cleared then she can initiate an order that will take another week to finish processing. If it hasn’t cleared she must call back every day to see if she can order DSL from Verizon. Do you see anything wrong with this picture?

My Mom’s other option for internet access is via Time Warner Cable. Unfortunately the install of the cable modem requires running wire around her living room and drilling through a wall to put a cable drop in her second bedroom. She prefers utilizing the existing phone jack to get access.

As far as I’m concerned both AT&T and Verizon have acted disgracefully in this situation. AT&T provides an overpriced service that performs poorly and provides little or no service. Verizon, on the other hand, has poorly trained customer service reps. Switching internet service from a provider as large as AT&T should be an absolute ground ball. My Mom has been very clear in what she needed to do yet here we are a week and a half after the first call to Verizon and we’re still not sure if Verizon has gotten it right.

My first bit of advice to anyone purchasing internet access is to never buy access from someone who doesn’t own the wires. That means get access from either your cable company or your phone company. Other providers like AOL, Earthlink and AT&T to name a few try to get involved to give you better deals or better service. Don’t believe the hype. These companies just add a layer of complexity and wind up costing more (in spite of their teaser offers) in the long run.

In a perfect world companies like AT&T would add value and take pride in providing superior service. In the real world they are just happy to get your money and provide you with mediocre service that is marked up so they can make a sufficiently high profit on unsuspecting customers.

Shame on AT&T. Your DSL service needs a lot of work and I will never recommend it to anyone. Shame on Verizon. Your customer service reps should be better trained so that customers can complete simple transactions in a single call that has them on the phone for a reasonable amount of time.