Kerry D. Wong » AT&T

I Was Not Alone

kwong — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 01:48:10 +0000

In June and July, I wrote a couple of posts (1, 2) about my experience with AT&T, and apparently many more people have had similar experiences.Even people from like George Ou from ZDNet wrote openly (1, 2) criticizing AT&T’s broadband reliability and it’s customer service qualities. I am glad that finally someone from a trustworthy source finally voiced his concern and I am hoping that we will see some improvements in AT&T’s broadband services in the near future.

To be fair though, besides the initial problems with AT&T, I haven’t had any major issues after I finally got connected (knock on wood). Nevertheless, there is no excuse for the poor customer service AT&T provides.

Switching from AT&T to … AT&T – My Experience

kwong — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 00:58:20 +0000

SBC Yahoo (now AT&T) was the internet service provider I used when I was living in Wisconsin. When I moved to Connecticut, I had to re-establish my internet service. The first thing came in mind was “do I have anything that I can’t live without AT&T’s internet service?” Well, over the years, people had got accustomed to my email account at sbcglobal.net. Even though my permanent email address was my UW alumni email address and everything was forwarded to it, I felt that it was still a good idea to keep my email address. Plus, my wife was using her email account with SBC Yahoo as well. So without much hesitation, I signed up for AT&T. And during the initial signup, I was reassured verbally that I could still use my old email addresses. This made perfect sense since after all I was dealing with one company.

At least that was what I thought. Then one day last month, I had some internet connection issue and when I was talking to the technician at AT&T, I leant that the problem was caused by my Wisconsin user id. He further explained that I would need to get a new id if I wanted to continue using AT&T internet service. He also reminded me that my old user ids’ will be inactivated within 60 days.

So two days ago, my email account with AT&T internet service all of a sudden stopped working. When I logged into my account on sbc.yahoo.com (SBC Yahoo internet service is now part of AT&T), I was greeted with the following screen:

I guess I will have to start using my new account id now. And when they deactivate my old ids in a month I could in theory try to reclaim them if nobody else had chosen to do so.

So why is it so difficult to just “switch” my service from Wisconsin to Connecticut? Well, in theory, it shouldn’t. But in reality, AT&T has become such a large telecom company through mergers and acquisitions, not all of its own systems are as connected as they should be. Later on, during a conversation with one of AT&T’s senior technicians, he admitted that the reason they could not easily do a transparent switch was because the Wisconsin region and Connecticut region were run by two different entities, and they manage their own databases.

MTU or 2701HG Gateway Issue?

kwong — Tue, 08 May 2007 00:22:55 +0000

After I moved to Connecticut, I got my high speed internet from AT&T (SBC Yahoo). The reason is more or less because I had been using SBC Yahoo DSL in Wisconsin for a few years and so I know for sure that it works pretty well with home web hosting. Also, I have my email account with them and it is such a hassle to change my email account.

For the past few days, I noticed some strange problems with my DSL connection and I am yet to identify the exact cause.

From my server at home, I can go to localhost and browse the web pages from there with no problem. But if I go to kerrywong.com, I would occasionally get a connection timed out error. My first thought was that it got to have something to do with MTU settings, since in the past I had experienced similar intermittent connection problems and in the end all had attributed to incorrect MTU settings.

So I checked my MTU settings in my 2701HG-B gateway (can be accessed at http://gateway.2wire.net/mdc, under Advanced -> Configuration Services). By default it was set to 1492. Thinking it might be too high for my DSL connection, I changed it down gradually all the way to 1300. But the intermittent connection problem still remained. I then forced Windows MTU down to roughly the same value (MTU value can be edited using regedit, My Computer -> HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE -> SYSTEM -> CurrentControlSet -> Services -> Tcpip -> {adapter id} -> MTU), but the problem still seemed to come and go.

The weirdest thing is that it appears that the connection issue only occurs when trying to access my server’s external URL from behind the 2701HG gateway, which made me also ponder that maybe it is not the MTU, it might just be a setting in the somewhere in the gateway that needs to be tweaked. But as of for now, I have not found it yet…