"Stop AT&T!"

March 29, 2001 3:27 PM

"Stop AT&T!" As expected, former Northpoint customers are losing or have already lost their DSL services, due to AT&T's decision to simply interrupt service. If you are one of the over 121,000 customers affected, sign this petition to let them know how how many people this has angered.
posted by valerie (8 comments total)

Talk about a bonehead move. This morning I has a message on voice mail telling me that our DSL line was down but they had a free dial-up account for our office to use. Dial-up for six people and servers? What a joke. AT&T would have had my business if they simply would have converted us to Worldnet customers instead of pulling the plug. What kind of message does this send to 121,000 potential customers?
posted by Brilliantcrank at 3:31 PM on March 29, 2001

My work connection went down at exactly 10am today. And it's never coming back (we patched into the adjoining company's t3).
posted by mathowie at 3:32 PM on March 29, 2001

My personal site and email went down since it was sitting on a (very nice friends') Northpoint DSL line. Luckily another very nice friend was already working on getting our server onto another line so I was better prepared than I thought. But I have to play DNS catchup now. And when I contacted the guy who hosts my secondary DNS to ask him to make changes he laughed .... his office DSL had just gone down too!
posted by girlhacker at 4:02 PM on March 29, 2001

I signed up for Telocity last month, and they sent me an email this week saying that I need to place my order again, as my carrier would've been Northpoint. I cancelled my order, I'll probably get Earthlink's DSL
posted by riffola at 4:28 PM on March 29, 2001

I don't get it - why are people pissed at AT&T for not providing something they didn't buy in the first place? AT&T didn't buy Northpoint, it bought some of the assets of Northpoint; if you actually read the original article, the fourth paragraph very clearly states that direct customer contracts were not included in the sales of assets to AT&T (along with a list of other stuff). AT&T bought, at what assumes were fire-sale prices, some hardware they could use in their own network. AT&T does some stuff wrong and they're a big company and a really easy target, but maybe your scorn should be reserved for the crappy business people at Northpoint (or those snarky double-dealers at Verizon) who actually stranded you in the first place...
posted by m.polo at 4:29 PM on March 29, 2001

Good point. Northpoint is to blame for not handling its end of the bargain well, methinks; just saying, "We're selling things to AT&T" is vague... even if they mention that "some of the assets" are sold, that doesn't forgive Northpoint from not spelling things out. The assets that didn't get sold were simply cut off.

Bad customer service!

Of course, assuming that they didn't, AT&T's side of the coin should have been to tell customers that what they bought from Northpoint didn't involve service, and they'd be SOL... unless they wanted a dialup account (snicker).

And trust me, I'm not defending AT&T. I hate them.
posted by hijinx at 4:37 PM on March 29, 2001

AT&T probably doesn't need the equipment ; they probably brought it to keep another company from rescuing Northpoint.

A group of ISP's offered to provide funding to keep Northpoint up and running until they could transfer their customers to another provider (Rhythms, Covad or the baby bells) unfortunately Northpoint and its creditors kept raising the the amount of funding required and would not guarantee that the network would stay in operation.
posted by andre_111 at 4:48 PM on March 29, 2001

related: AT&T broadband just bought prime cable, according to my monthly statement. i'm sure the already-suffering service is going to go downhill, so subscribers may wanna start shopping around...
posted by patricking at 6:29 PM on March 29, 2001