[PLUG] BA DSL line install for Northpoint (was: BA DSL)

[Jeff Dean <jdean@ieee.org>]

Though my DSL service is provided by Northpoint, I thought you'd like to
hear BA's side of our recent install.  In our case, we needed a new pair of
wires attached to our residence.  BA supplied those services, which didn't
cost us anything extra (I don't know if it cost Northpoint or my ISP).  On
the appointed day, BA arrived on time at 8:00AM with TWO huge cherry-picker
maintenance trucks.  It was cold, so one guy sat in his truck while the
other snooped the ground looking for a wire junction that he needed to
splice.  He did this for around 45 minutes, when the other guy started
snooping on his own.  At about 9:00AM a third truck showed up with two more
guys, this time from a subcontractor.  It turns out they were assigned the
job of digging and filling the hole - and that's all.  They literally slept
in their truck while the BA guys decided where the dig was to occur.  When
they had the location (at the end of my driveway) they informed the sub and
went back to the two BA trucks to warm up.  Then the subcontractor guys dug
the hole.  By the time the hole was done it was around 11:00AM, and the
subcontractors went back to their truck for another long break.  The BA
guys did the wiring change in about 10 minutes, but the wire bundle needed
to be repotted, which required more than an hour's wait before it could be
buried.

I left for lunch, assuming that the hole would get filled and everyone
would go on to something more productive than looking at their dashboards.
To my surprise, when I returned at 2:30PM, the hole was filled but both BA
trucks were still hanging around, and they stayed until 5:30 that
evening!!!  Forgive me if I'm oversimplifying, but does it really take four
guys, three expensive trucks, and over 24 total man-hours to connect one
pair of wires?  I shudder to think of BA's overhead costs if this is how
they conduct business routinely.

None of this affected us, except that we found that they had trashed our
ISDN line.  We still had some time to wait until Northpoint installed the
DSL router (single fixed IP + NAT), so we called to get the ISDN fixed.  As
it turned out, we didn't even get through to anyone with a clue at BA
Infospeed until 1.5 WEEKS later!!!  Of course, the DSL was installed and
running fine by then, so we bagged the ISDN and BA entirely.  BA is, I
suspect, completely overwhelmed by their DSL installs, and we were
extremely unsatisfied.  Buyer beware.

Other than being too expensive ($130/mo for 160k SDSL), the DSL via
Northpoint has been rock solid.  I'm not checking constantly, but we've
seen no downtime yet.  

jd


Jeff Dean
jdean@ieee.org

______________________________________________________________________
Philadelphia Linux Users Group       -       http://plug.nothinbut.net
Announcements - http://lists.nothinbut.net/mail/listinfo/plug-announce
General Discussion   -   http://lists.nothinbut.net/mail/listinfo/plug