AT&T Rant...

[ibanezfoo]

Any of you guys use them for any of your corporate services? We're being forced to switch away from Sprint and to AT&T... Good God is it a nightmare. AT&T has to be run by illiterate monkeys. Thats the only explanation for dealing with what we are dealing with... They can't get MPLS circuits in a datacenter they recommended to us... So then they switch us to a different datacenter 50 miles away. But they can't install it there either... they have to do some kind of VLAN trickery to make it work. Then they don't provide us with any equipment and don't tell us any of the BGP settings to put on our own equipment. Our AT&T project manager is in India and only works India daylight hours... so that means to do any test and turn up we have to work at midnight to 3 am. He "educated" so that essentially means he doesn't have to do his job. He's 10,000 miles away so we can't ring his neck. Even the people within AT&T want to smack him one. Never returns emails and apparently doesn't read them either... waits until the last second and then denies what you want saying theres a 48 hour lead time.... his response to something that was given to him over a week ago. And they don't want to give us another project manager.

When we have to install a location they always ship the routers to the wrong location. They never seem to program them correctly... god forbid they put an appropriate egress point / default gateway.... instead they mess up their own BGP and group part of our WAN with some other customer (hows that for security eh?) so our default gateway winds up in Washington or Oregon somewhere up there...

Sprint does whatever we want whenever we want. None of this drama. Telepacific used to be ok but the economy took them out. I HATE HATE HATE AT&T. My decision making was taken from me and given to the corporate fools... we switched to AT&T as a global company to "save money".. except nobody did the math and its actually costing us a significant amount more.

With Sprint I program all of the routers myself. If I screw up I log in and fix it. Not submit at email (or call, only to be told I have to submit an email) and a few days later -if we are lucky-an "engineer" will call us back and make whatever changes we need.... usually wrong the first few times...

Need to port some phone numbers from one PRI to another? Sure, they can do it... and then lose your numbers. Then get them back. Then mess up the programming. Then maybe a month or so down the road you will have the correct numbers in the correct places.

Oh, then they bill you for $30,000 for outdated (fiber vs. DS3... and the DS3 rides over fiber anyway! grrr )equipment that you only agreed to because it was "free". Then you get to fight their billing department every month for the next 6 months to remove the charge, each time being told that the charges have been removed.

Any business owners out there thinking about using AT&T for any of their data products, RUN. Run far, run fast. WORST. COMPANY. EVER.

Did I mention I *HATE* AT&T?

whew... ok... try to breathe... relax...

[dynamomark80]

I guess you have to keep all your notes for the bs they pull on you. forward all emails to your boss and corporate. maybe they will get the idea in due time. Bottom line if if you continue showing that ATT is costing them more money then before they will eventually do something. make sure all problems and issues are documented so you have something to fall back on.

[scoutpup99]

Don't feel bad I work for att and run into the same issues in the field. Took me over 6 months to get a dsl circuit up and running for a cable monitor I installed inside one our huts. It took a couple of weeks to get the router configured with the correct vp/vc for the ATM circuit. For what ever reason the had the vp/vc transposed in the gateway router. Once I got in contact with a guy from he NOC in southern CA it took only a few minutes to fix the issue. The guy in India never figured it out even though I told him what the issue was.

[.22guy]

Not a corporate account but I recently cancelled their home phone/internet service. I just got really tired of their BS.

[TainoWarrior]

I work for AT&T and I see it every day with customer dealing with these morons from overseas. Majority of customers I deal with cancel due to services issues or customer services related issues. Customer service is a major problem with AT&T.

[ibanezfoo]

So then we get to stay at the datacenter until after 11pm last night (I started at 7am...) and left with no resolution. For you guys that work at AT&T, does anyone in that company actually communicate with each other? We were told one thing about the design, and then when we go to test and turn up its all wrong... No its not just an MPLS connection, its an AVPN connection which we don't have a router for.... so we try to get the public/internet side connected. Just hook it to our firewall and take a wild guess from the multiple sets of public IP settings they gave us. It was wrong of course... so we finally get the right ones and connectivity is sporadic at best.... also supposed to be 150 meg and we get about 60... So they get all mad saying that the handoff is supposed to be connected to a switch and not a firewall... Uh, ok, news to me... so are we using LACP, NSRP, some other aggregating, bonding, or fail over technology? Our firewall does some things but not all... I didn't even bring a switch because it was never relayed to us. We chewed one of the project managers (who is actually in the U.S. amazingly enough) for over half an hour about how poorly this is being handled.

And to think I had some complaints about Sprint when we first got them... but those were resolved in half a day by people we can understand. Been dealing with AT&T for over 9 months now. This is pathetic! Over 9 months for a simple datacenter install? A single mesh internet pipe and an MPLS connection to the corporate WAN.... 9 months and two datacenters and they still can't do it right...

Of course this is all talking to a guy with a MAJOR Indian accent in a very loud datacenter with fans, A/C, humming things all around on a crappy AT&T cell phone...

A V O I D AT&T at all costs!

[bigbearbear]

I have dealt with 2 different companies, both of which are pretty good. Speakeasy (now Megapath) many years back when we required a T1 line. Good support with the folks in Seattle.

For datacenter, we went with Internap in Santa Clara. They're a Texas based outfit with datacenter all over. We signed up for their co-location server and support had been great. There was a little trouble with the Ethernet ports not working properly due to traffic shaping on their end but they resolved it quickly and professionally. Their on-site techs worked with me tracing everything from wires to routers to isolate the issue. They even tested individual cables for me.

Look into these 2 as alternatives. Megapath if you just want the connection, Internap if you want a datacenter.

[ibanezfoo]

I've heard good things about Megapath... in fact I believe thats what we use at a few of our L.A. divisions.


Its amazing... today I got to talk to someone who speaks perfect English... Sounded like he was from Texas or something. He actually explained how the handoffs are supposed to work and the correct 801.q settings to use on our sub-interfaces... The super awesome amazing technology of AT&T's AVPN is simply...... tada! router-on-a-stick.

Now we wait another 2 weeks for that to go to provisioning... Hell, by 2025 we should have a fully functional datacenter! whoohoo!

[den888]

I use AT&T at home and their service is pretty decent, but the alternates (Comcast and Charter) are by far worse. I pick the worst of 3 evils.

[zealot9802]

Ive been dealing with a switch from Telapacific to At&t. They have left me with my pants down twice. Having both my It and phone vendors here and the LOA not being approved. WTF would you schedule if you dont have approval. My at&t rep was literally yelling on a conference call to the guy in india about releasing the numbers. I dont even know if i should just cut my losses and just cancel. Only thing keeping me is the 4k credit we will be receiving for the move.

[zuchaka]

ya i have 2 friends and a family member in areas ATT 'dead zones' since i dumped my land line a long time ago that makes me dependent on my cell, which ironically enough i conduct business on. So ya i had to dump ATT for Verizon and i am glad i did, next dropped call with be the first one.

[ibanezfoo]

Ive been dealing with a switch from Telapacific to At&t. They have left me with my pants down twice. Having both my It and phone vendors here and the LOA not being approved. WTF would you schedule if you dont have approval. My at&t rep was literally yelling on a conference call to the guy in india about releasing the numbers. I dont even know if i should just cut my losses and just cancel. Only thing keeping me is the 4k credit we will be receiving for the move.

Its fun huh? I honestly dont think it would be so bad if the project managers were American and understood American business. The Indians are rediculous and dont care about anything. The reason we are changing datacenters is because, like you, they promised to set something up without even having connectivity there. Only after we put our equipment in there and sign contracts do they bother to enter into negotiations with the datacenter to bring their circuits into the building. How does the mighty AT&T not have connectivity to a datacenter?

[wrestlingnrj]

At my last job working IT for a scrap recycling chain we made the exact same move from Sprint to ATT to manage almost all of the same services. We had the exact same problems with them. I know they were in the process of suing ATT when I left for breach of contract due to all of the issues we had with their services. I was also responsible for switching about 1000 cell phones over from Verizon and Sprint to ATT. Within a week of switching each location to ATT, I would receive non stop emails from the managers asking to please switch them back because of how awful their coverage and service was. The only reason we switched everything to ATT in the first place was cost, they were going to save us a few hundred thousand a year in costs, but with all of the issues and down time we had, I'd say it ended up costing us more.

[ibanezfoo]

At my last job working IT for a scrap recycling chain we made the exact same move from Sprint to ATT to manage almost all of the same services. We had the exact same problems with them. I know they were in the process of suing ATT when I left for breach of contract due to all of the issues we had with their services. I was also responsible for switching about 1000 cell phones over from Verizon and Sprint to ATT. Within a week of switching each location to ATT, I would receive non stop emails from the managers asking to please switch them back because of how awful their coverage and service was. The only reason we switched everything to ATT in the first place was cost, they were going to save us a few hundred thousand a year in costs, but with all of the issues and down time we had, I'd say it ended up costing us more.

Oh man I havent even brought up the cell phones... Lucky for me one of the other admins is handling it.... and with the same results We used to either pay for their Sprint phones or expense whatever other service they wanted. Now its ATT or nothing... ATT actually has a minimum amount we have to spend. Most people hate their ATT phones and its a pain to port over numbers and stuff. We actually make note when one is successful because its a rarity...