Cash for customers

DSL may be going strong, but it hasn't been smooth sailing - and the fingers are waggling at incumbents. To wit, Jump.Net last week said it would stop submitting ADSL orders to SBC for 30 days. SBC has provided Jump.Net's ADSL service in Texas for three years, but the incumbent is so backlogged, the broadband access provider is giving SBC a chance to "catch up" on its orders.

Jump.Net still will offer other flavors of DSL through more able partners: NorthPoint and IP Communications. To be fair, SBC processes about 75% of Jump.Net's orders - far more than the other DSL providers must deal with - and Jump.Net claims to add about 300 to 500 orders to the queue per day. Jump.Net has offered to hold its customers' orders so they don't get lost in the SBC machine, said Dewey Coffman, vice president of sales and marketing for Jump.Net. "If they wait until Sept. 1, they might get installed," he said. If SBC still has problems processing orders in September, "we might halt orders completely," Coffman said.

The problem isn't simply one of slow order processing, however. Jump.Net charges that SBC has lost orders and is guilty of DSL slamming, which SBC calls "unhooking." Coffman said SBC's techs often are too green to install DSL correctly - some have only been on the job for two days. Jump.Net customers note that SBC installers encourage them to switch to Southwestern Bell Internet Services even before the Jump.Net service is hooked up.

SBC has a reputation for playing by its own rules, and in this case, it seems to make them up as it goes along. After the merger with Ameritech was complete, it was rumored that SBC pushed out Ameritech's CSRs and bolstered its ranks of technicians. The problem with that approach is that service is poorly or incorrectly installed, and no CSRs are available to help set things straight.

In SBC's defense, a spokesman said this: "It certainly is not a policy of SBC to switch customers. We've been working with [Jump.Net] on that issue. We are aware of their concerns, and any customers who have been switched in error are being switched back to Jump.Net. That should be done by [Aug. 4]." He admits that some customers were "inadvertently" switched, but "it was a very small number of customers ... maybe only 100 or so."

But techs aren't solely to blame for the DSL slamming. Part of the problem is directed confusion. According to Coffman, SBC ships the DSL CPE with a CD that automatically configures the customer's PC for SBIS DSL service. "Two months ago, we asked them to take that out of the box. They shouldn't even have the CD in the box," he said. And once the customers have SBIS DSL, they are reluctant to switch - even if they originally requested Jump.Net service.

"If [SBIS installed] another ISP, it used to take three to five days to switch them back to us. Now it takes 21 days, plus seven days of downtime. And they say that won't be fixed until the first quarter [of 2001]," Coffman said. "Our customers have to wait 60 days for installation, and they don't want to switch."

And who can blame them? No one wants to wait a month or longer to get high-speed access. And once you have it, you'll never be satisfied with a standard modem link. Internet access is an excruciating experience for road warriors stuck in hotels without high-speed connections. If you don't want it on the road, you surely don't want it at home.

Perhaps that's what SBC is counting on: Get in while you can, and let the competitive carriers worry about the consequences. In my view, SBC isn't only a poor team player; it owes Jump.Net cash. Jump.Net's marketing efforts attracted the customers, and its sales team reeled them in. And yet, without service, Jump.Net isn't making money from the deal. SBC should pay Jump.Net a finder's fee for its role in capturing the customer. Maybe if SBC lost some money, it would be less inclined to steal Jump.Net's customers.