So, I encountered my first issue yesterday with Uverse, since first having it installed last June in temp housing and even after moving to our new house and transferring service over.
I was on a conference call leveraging a VoIP application and I noticed my audio cut out and some other connected apps on my desktop stopped responding. A couple of minutes later, things stabilized. About 5-10 minutes later and I was knocked completely offline and my TV and phone were dead. So, I immediately logged into my 2Wire gateway to see what was happening. The DSL signal would not synch. So, I figure it must be something outside. So, I go through the standard call center song and dance. I finally get to an agent and after running tests and rebooting the gateway etc. they tell me my router must be dying. So they schedule a tech to come swap the router.
In the meantime, about an hour later, my service just magically starts working again. The tech shows up about an hour later and admits that they were pushing firmware updates to customer routers during the day. He had already been to a couple of other customers who had the same issue. Essentially, when the update kicks off, it can consume your entire link bandwidth and then it will automatically reboot the router to load the new firmware. The problem is that when it comes back online it may not properly be able to synch a connection. We ended up doing a hardware reset using the red button on the back of the gateway and everything went back to normal.
The frustration I have with this is that it was the middle of the day and I was on a conference call for work. What company makes changes to their production networks and services in the middle of the day?! Secondly, when I did call in, the agent had no idea that an update had been pushed to my router and could only tell me that she thought the equipment was faulty and needed to be replaced.
I would expect a great deal more service maturity out of AT&T than this. I've learned my lesson this go around and can take matters in my own hands next time. But, what about all the other clueless customers who get burned by this? Have customers really become that expendable that doing upgrades and killing their service during the business day is considered okay? I understand these kinds of issues occur with upgrades. That is not my concern. I just don't understand how anyone can justify doing this during normal business hours.
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Scott, CCIE #14618 Routing & Switching
http://rolande.wordpress.com/
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