Theft By Deception

We have been AT&T customers for many years (phone & internet) both residential and business. The residence was upgraded to DSL from dial-up. In hind sight the upgrade to the old AT&T DSL from dialup was a great improvement but, over the years the DSL came to be more like dialup, getting slower and slower with each passing year. Also the phone quality degraded along with the internet speed. The phone would pop and crack and there was a sound like high pressure air, this problem would come and go and about the time you thought it was the bad weather it would do it on a clear dry day. Much time was wasted trying to get it fixed mostly falling on def ears. And it would go from bad to worse from annoying to it was so loud you had to hang up because the call was unintelligable.

After going through the process of trying to talk to a human about the problem and waiting and waiting on the phone and finally talking to a man who sounded like he was in India and trying to understand his accent, he had the repair crews in the neighborhood doing the repairs within a week. A repairman out on the pole told me there were multiple repairs in the area. The improvement was nice but, short lived and the service began to degrade shortly there after. I often thought that the problem was our computer being the culprit, needing to be cleaned of all the internet junk that the computer collects and so I became a pro computer cleaner using Ccleaner and keeping the computer spick and span and free of malware etc. Still the slow DSL percisted and more time was wasted online. Just trying to watch a 52 second video on weather.com or att.net might take as long as 15 minutes or just giving up on it. All this and not two blocks from our home there is what I would have to call a substation for telephone, internet and television. It consists of 7 large metal boxes on a concrete slab. This must be the new u-verse stuff because before this was installed phone men would stand out there under a rain awning cutting twisted pair wires making or breaking phone/dsl connections. You would think that being that close to that much equiptment I would have to have one of the best connections/service in the Universe (U-verse) not so, still same old slow DSL. I would go to speedtest.net and use Ookla to test my internet speed but lots of times my speed was so slow it would not even run the test . I have measured the download speed as slow as 0.15Mbps and I have seen pings measured in whole seconds, one and two seconds. And the green graph of the speed test looked like the teeth of a saw blade going almost straight up and almost straight down to cut off and back up. Most of the time Ookla would tell me that Flashplay was not installed on my computer and I would go and download it again and again, dozens of times. I was at youtube and watched a video with little trouble once and so I shot over to Ookla real quick and Flashplayer loaded the test real quick and got a good test so thats how I found out I did not have to keep downloading Flashplayer. Our DSL for years has been up and down (mostly down) and just before I called AT&T this last time I told Teresa that AT&T owes us a lot of money, the lost time, aggrivation and frustration!

So now we come to the real problem as if what I have been talking about is not bad enough. I received a magazine sized add for U-verse deals in the mail. It had a big picture of a glass bowl of popcorn on the cover touting "The best seat in the house" and internet (5-6Mbps), phone 200min. mo. and tv u200 for $79.00 mo. for 2yrs. and 12mo. contract. I had been having a bad DSL day and was close to tears when I saw a phone number in the add and thought I might call it and find some help without going through the regular dial up and wait to talk to someone, and maybe they could help with a special number to get things done, (big mistake).

A kind almost too smooth voice answered immediatley on the other end of the line. I'll call him L.G. This guy was the best listener in the world, he was a pro, letting me vent my frustrations, never interupting me and letting me go on and on. Like a spider in a web waiting for the victim to get tangled before jumping in too soon. Once I had exhausted myself and explained what I have come to call "DSL PAIN", he, L.G. told me that it was not my fault and that the new U-verse system was stealing bandwidth from the old DSL system and that I had been getting robbed for a long time. I could not belive it! an honest person! (huh) Making me feel like everything was going to be alright, (Not). It sure did feel good for a while. Well, L.G. told me he could give me the repair number I required but, things would be the same in a few days after the repairs were made just like in the past.

I mentioned the $79.00 a month for all three services and that we were paying AT&T about $61.00 and change for slow DSL and phone. L.G. wanted to know what kind of channels I liked the most and I told him I like educational channels like history, DIY, Nat Geo, Nat Geo W, TLC, etc. And also that I like Ted Nuggent's outdoor show (important latter). I told L.G. that I needed to talk to Teresa about it to get her ok and he said he would send me an email telling when he would call to discuss the deal. Teresa and I determined that the additional money for the $79.00 deal was doable and that we would try it.

When L.G. called we discussed the deal but, now the deal had gone from $79.00 a month to $101.00 a month and when I asked him how that happened he said do you remember talking about all the channels you like and talking about Ted Nuggent's show, Well I custom made you a channel list with all the channels you like and I added Ted Nuggent's show. I asked him how many channels that came to and he said about 265. ( When the installer came to do the install and I told him I was getting the custom channels and the Ted Nuggent show, he just rolled his eyes and said, well you got the u200 and that is when I knew I had been had.) The installer gave me a channel chart and sure enough all I got was the $79.00 deal of u200 and no Ted Nuggent show. I counted the total number of channels on u200 and it came to 230 channels if you can call things like a whole channel being devoted to a guide to Colorado a channel. The state of Main, Cancer your options and dozens of sales channels like QVC and AT&T's own sales channels (multiple ones) and on and on. So 230 subtracted from 265 leaves 35 lost channels and no Ted Nuggent.

After the install I received an estimate of the first months bill for August at $ 101.00 a month (Oh yeah, L.G. said he would get rid of Augusts bill because of the DSL and phone pain we had been through, another lie.) We installed on July 31 2014 and it was finished at dark so AT&T just had to prorate the bill for one whole day. Can't lose a cent. Several things were wrong with the install including a remote that did not work and had to be replaced. So the first night and several days after was spent fighting the remote until I noticed it worked a lot better if the remote was held two feet from the receiver, thats why the installer did not catch it because he was on top of the receiver all the time (one tv install). After the bill estimate, on about August 10 we received the August bill for $117.45, $16.45 over the estimate and if you think AT&T will say that that is normal, when I contacted Charter Communications after the install they came up with what would be my first bill including all taxes and charges in like one minute while I was on the phone with them if I decided to change and they would pay the early cancel fees up to $500.00 (Ido not think any should be paid since I was lied to.) This August bill goes to August 25, why not the whole month ? And then we are informed that September will be around or over $120.00. This is too much. How much can a person stand ? And we get emails saying CONGRATULATIONS your first AT&T bill is here, I guess they think I would cellibrate a root canal and if thats not enough we get a video link to go and cellibrate our video bill with a voice that says Teresa every chance it gets (the account is in Teresa's name). This is too too much, like being transported to another really weird realm.

I want to inject something here, L.G. said that the 5 Mbps up to 6 Mbps that I was getting with my deal, he had never seen go below 5 Mbps. Well, the very next day I went to speedtest.net and tested the download speed at 3.75 Mbps, in all fairness I have never seen it go this low again but, it did happen, also not a day has gone by without the picture pixilating, getting jiggy and freezing multiple times a day

I hope someone can help me on this forum, there is more to this story but, I am too tired to keep writing about this very painfull experiance. I hate doing this and spending my time going through this. So I will wait for a while to get this fixed and if that dosen't happen its good by AT&T.

wrecksford