Best of the ISP-Lists

Dealing With AT&T

It's not just end users who find it tough to use AT&T—even partner ISPs have a rough ride.

[September 23, 2008]

This is a perennial topic on the lists. Wherever you are, if you're buying a connection from the phone company, you're having all sorts of problems. Problems start with billing and move on to the esoteric. Here's another.

On the ISP-Wireless list in September, MC asked:

Does anyone have some experience with the ATT Ethernet MIS product? What is your opionion?

[JO replied] "My advice would be to avoid it at all costs unless you really have to be connected to AS7018. They have one of the more painful change management processes I have dealt with. On the plus side it is pretty reliable. ATT MIS is also not very price competitive in most places so I guess my question would be what is driving you towards ATT?

I should note that my experience with ATT MIS was T-1s years ago and more recently (until last year) with gigE and fastE hand-offs."

[RG added] "Anything to do with AT&T is painful!!! If you've never had the experience, consider yourself fortunate!"

[LM suggested] "If you can deal with ACC Business, a division of AT&T, you're much better off. When ACC could not get us a competitive DS3 quote and we left them for another provider I actually hated to leave them. Sales rep and billing wise ACC was great to deal with for years. A good sales rep takes care of you."

[RG agreed] "I agree with you there. I've spoken to them before and was impressed."

[JO insisted] "The painful part of ATT is the change management., and you can't get around that with ACC business. I had to put up with three to four day turn-around times on getting BGP prefixes added to our prefix filters. It would not have been so bad except that they also reverse path filtered so any route that they did not accept would have traffic sourced from that route black-holed. I never could get that fixed with them and ended up dropping it due to the hassle involved."

[RG concluded] "I agree with that too. Unfortunately, sometimes you have no choice but to use them. Asking AT&T to do anything, including give you a timely bill give me the shivers. My wife didn't believe me until she took over the books. She now hates them as much as I do."

— End