Let me preface this story by saying that my previous service was with Allegiance Telecom and I have had nothing but great service for the two years that I have been with them. My only consideration in making the change was to save a few dollars a month.

Forced Sale
The first gotcha was the fact that they will not sell their DSL service unless you are using their local phone service. This promised to save me a few more dollars each month and included up to 6 add on services (Caller ID, Call Waiting etc.) so I switched my phone service also. Once I received the first bill, however, I discovered that I had been ‘mislead’ by the sales person. It turns out that the add on services include add on charges.

Timeline
I ordered the service on Aug 25 and was told that they would ship the (free) hardware to me. On Sept 3, I received an email with a UPS tracking number (that’s a fantastic service in itself, but that's a different review). The email said that I should wait until I receive the next email confirming that my account had been established before I installed anything. The hardware arrived within a few days along with a letter stating that my account would be set up on Sept 5 and I should be able to begin installation at that time, however, I was again advised to wait for the confirming email. A week later, I sent an email asking what was holding up the progress, I received an immediate reply that the line had not yet been set up and that I should wait for the confirming email. Is anyone beginning to see a pattern here? On Sept 25 (still no email) I received a phone call from Customer Service asking how I liked their service. I had her check my account and was told that the line had been set up and ready to use on Sept 5.

Installation
The installation of the hardware was simple enough. The software installation went smoothly until I got to the point were I had to access the Internet to continue. I got a screen saying that the process could not continue because my IE was too old (version 4.0), did I want to upgrade to 5.0? It did not even check to see if I had another browser installed. I do not use IE as my primary browser and when I do use it, I have specific reasons for needing an older version. I stopped the installation at this point.

I was told by Tech Support that I should install the upgraded browser and then I could go back later and uninstall, there was no other way that I could complete the account activation process, I started over. Instead of picking up where it left off, the installation started over from the beginning. When I told it to install the IE upgrade, my computer locked up and none of the usual escape mechanisms would function. The only way out was to shut off the power.

Tech Support
The process involved 5 calls to Tech Support. The average length of time spent waiting on hold was about 30 minutes per call and that was just waiting for someone to initially answer the call, I was frequently put on hold during the call while somebody was off somewhere trying to find out what was going on. Their canned music put me to sleep more than once.

When I asked for the address of their DNS servers to set up the router on my home network, I was very belligerently told that I could not have that information because they did not support routers. The second technician I asked told me, only slightly less rudely that he did not know. In all fairness, all the other people I talked to, although they weren’t very much more helpful, were at least polite.

When I asked about their software crashing my system, I was told that out of all their hundreds of thousands of customers, I was the only one that had ever encountered that problem so it had to be my fault and they couldn’t help. After several failed recovery attempts, I ended up having to reformat my hard drive and start over.

Total Installation Time
Who knows? After 35 days I stopped the process.

Does It Work?
Who knows? With all the problems encountered, I canceled my account and decided to stay with my previous provider.