Internet out, strung along by support

Update, talked to a rep today that said the tower would be up by 4:12am tomorrow morning.........

So I have been out since Tuesday at 12:30PM. Drove to the tower up the hill and no one was working on it.

Just talked to a tech. Rebooted,, reset, moved around the house.

He attempted to move me to another tower, bit said it was full because other customers had been moved there. He said I would have to wait until Monday to see if they would get it fixed by then........

Should I not be upset? This thread sits ignored and is basically where I am documenting the apathy of AT&T about me as a customer.

I am bleeding money here as I work out of my home office. Apparently rural customers are not a priority, even though the government subsidized AT&T putting in towers to expand their business.

I don't know what to do. Maybe it is time to get media involved.

@2hawks , this forum is not intended as a direct channel to keep you informed about a customer-specific (or even a small regional) problem.  This forum exists primarily for AT&T customers to assist other customers.  AT&T support does pop in from time to time and provide suggestions (including to contact AT&T using the methods listed in the Contact Us page if you want personalized service).

AIA is an immature product where everyone is learning about it, including the support reps, the techs, and the customers.  If you're not willing to put up with the realities of this, then it may not be the best service for you.  It will never be as reliable or as stable as any wired product, though it may be faster that some of them.

I get that wireless is not as reliable, I worked at a wisp designing networks for a few years.

Unfortunately I live in a rural area, and AT&T is pretty much the only game in town other than satellite. AT&T has deprecated copper in our area and is in the middle of deprecating fixed wireless. I moved from fixed wireless because data overages were basically doubling the cost of my connection.

What I don't like is that how the service was sold and the reality of what it is.

AT&T has bungled this deployment in so many ways it is not funny. I know that had to reach deployment benchmarks to keep receiving subsidies from the government to rural deployments, like the one starlink failed to meet and lost the funding. 

The internet air hubs were not designed for most consumer wifi needs. I had to turn off wifi and get an ap because the hubs wifi kept crashing. 

They boasted 24/7 support in the adverts but then dropped to 12/6. When I was deployed, it got so bad they closed down support for a Saturday for an all hands support meeting.

They have totally oversold the service without a plan of network expansion to accommodate their rate of additions.

I can almost guarantee that the reason my issue is happening is because a bug in the automated provisioning where some got the service and the tower bumped me.

It is not so much it is not the service for me, but it is the ONLY service for me.

What gets me most is the general lack of concern, communication, and honesty with customers on these issues. Heck it took me 5 calls to get a tech to actually tell me that it was a when they get around to it fix. Prior to that, I was planning based on techs promises it would be up.

At this point, I am pretty sure I know more about their system then most of the support techs.

Called again today. Apparently the tower is still down. The tech talked with their tech and said they were escalating the issue and i should be back up in 24 hours. 

I won't hold my breath.

At least AT&T has achieved a 25% up time for me in the past 14 days........ 

StarLink may be a better solution or T-Mobile which has more wireless spectrum for rural areas…

https://www.lightreading.com/5g/t-mobile-wins-more-5g-spectrum-over-at-t-s-objections#

T-Mobile captured around 90% of all the licenses sold, or 7,156 of the 7,872 total licenses that received winning bids. T-Mobile agreed to pay around $304 million for those licenses – a relative steal considering the C-band auction for similar spectrum licenses generated an astounding $81 billion in winning bids

The FCC approved most of T-Mobile's 2.5GHz spectrum auction winnings, though it will require the company to divest some of its spectrum in Hawaii.

AT&T raised concerns over T-Mobile's spectrum auction purchases, arguing T-Mobile would gain an unfair position in the market with that additional spectrum. Moreover, the FCC indicated earlier this year it would review the "competitive effects" of T-Mobile's 2.5GHz spectrum winnings.

The FCC's approval paves the way for T-Mobile to add more 2.5GHz capabilities across roughly 11,000 cell sites in the US, mostly in rural areas. The company has said it will use that additional spectrum to improve its wireless network, including its fixed wireless access (FWA) services.

TMobile is not available in my area.

Starlink is available, but is twice as much for 1/2 the speed of the AT&T fixed wireless I was talked out of to move to this one.

Never got my call, which was supposed to be 24hrs after my last call. Internet is still down.

Called in. Tech had me do a hard reset. Still did not come up.

Tech said the tower was down. I asked for an estimated time for a repair. I asked if it would be a day, week, or a month. He said it definitely would not be a month. He said it might be a week though.

A N O T H E R. W E E K..........

Tech assured me I would be prorated for the time I am down. Of course this does not cover the money I have spent on streaming and other online services. It does not cover the gas I need to use to go in to town so I can acces the internet.

It also does not cover lost business since I work from my home office, but I should feel assured that I will not get charged for $25 worth of lost internet.

I gave up a solid fixed wireless service to move to internet air. A fixed wireless service I can't get back.

Given what you’ve said, it sounds like you’re invested in getting this working.  So keep working with them with a positive mindset and there will be a conclusion.  From personal experience difficult issues can take a lot of time to sort out.  It’s the local team that has to get it working for you and they may be at the mercy of other groups.  It’s better to be troubleshooting an issue like this for a new product than trying to get something fixed on a product like DSL where Att is clearly trying to walk away from.  

@gr8sho tyvm for the kind encouragement. Seriously. :)

Most of what I am doing now is pure documentation. For myself, other consumers, and anyone at AT&T who would like to know my customer experience and frustration.

I also documented my installation, which went completely south as well, here on the forum about 5 months ago.

You see, my hope was that someone from. AT&T might go through the forums and look at some of the posts and try and improve the process by fixing some of the things that have gone wrong.

The thing is, this whole project feels like anyone with technical knowledge was not involved. It feels like they put a bunch of bean counters and salesmen in charge of the design and deployment, who then ignored any input from support or net ops.

Maybe at some point, someone who can do something will read through the forums and see all of these common errors, pitfalls, and complaints and make corrections to their deployment process. 

I am not going to hold out hope though.