The Propheteer

Updated. For the latest, click on “more”:

I’m paying way too much a month to deal with the kind of downtime I’m experiencing on their service.
Sorry, Skynet. I’m moving to Verizon Fiber. I may not like the company, and I may have to start paying for business class service (ouch…) but if I’m paying for something, I expect to get it. To have my internet down for hours out of every week is unacceptable.

Here’s the situation that occurred:
On Saturday morning at 9:30am, a building in Leesburg that was/is home to one of the Leesburg repeaters for SkyNet Access was shut down, had its doors closed, and power shut off because the occupants left.
Monday evening they managed to negotiate access to the building and put a generator in place – a generator which has had some serious reliability issues.

Even now I’m not sure from moment to moment whether or not I’ll have a site up or my email working.

None of this is really their fault. There’s nothing they could have done that they didn’t do – technologically. However.

Here’s the situation as it appeared to me:
At around 9:30/10:00am on Saturday morning, I was suddenly unable to connect to the ‘net. Since this had happened at least twice before that week, I was miffed but mostly just annoyed. I figured it’d come back in a few hours, and I’d already checked to see that Fiber was a physically and economically viable option. I was pretty much ready to move at this point.
I called Skynet, I asked them to help me fix the problem, and they said there was nothing level 1 support could do, they’d have to forward it to level 2. Level 2 is annoying because they can’t actually forward *me* to level 2, they have to forward the ticket, and then I have to wait on their whim to call me back.

I waited the entire weekend.

I called back on Sunday night and was told that they didn’t know when it would be fixed. They went through the same set of diagnostics they’d gone through the first time – and would go through every time I called, despite the fact that there was never a new problem, just the same problem and a request for an update.

Monday morning I called again and was told that, well, it was the weekend, and I should really understand that, and that there’s a 24-48 hour period in which they’re expected to fix this – I pointed out that it had now been over 48 hours and they still couldn’t tell me what the problem was. I inquired as to whether they just didn’t do anything on weekends? They said they couldn’t comment on that. Which to me says “well, you know, they just don’t do anything on weekends”. Monday night, better than 55 hours after the start of the incident, I received a call back explaining what the problem was and that they would have a generator in place within the hour. I tried it by the appointed time, and no luck. Giving them the benefit of the doubt, I waited half an hour, and magically my internet was up.

Half an hour later, it was down again.

I called back – tier 1 support. They still had no knowledge of the root cause of the issue, ran the same diagnostics, and forwarded the ticket up the chain again.
An hour later, I discovered my internet was up again.
An hour after that, it was down again.
I called again.
Same story.
The next morning, 7am, still down. From things I gleaned on my system, it had never come back up overnight.
I called again.
Same story.
I finally got a call back that afternoon from SkyNet tier 2, saying power had been restored to the building and that their customers affected would be getting a 1 month credit to their accounts.

Too little, too late.

SkyNet is a communications company. They aren’t very good at communicating. A lot of my frustration and hostility would have simply vanished if I had only known what was going on. And all they had to do there was to contact the tier 1 support and let them know. Not even me directly. If I had called back Sunday night to be told the whole story, I would have said “oh…well, please let me know when you’ve resolved it”. I wouldn’t have wasted half the night troubleshooting my own equipment, trying to figure out whether it was on my end.

I was fairly convinced to leave SkyNet before this, but their constant unprofessional handling of outages like this, and their complete inability to communicate with me, coupled with increasing reliability issues, have pushed me over the edge.
If I ran websites at work like they run their entire company, I’d be fired.
So I’m firing them.