SBC getting poor grades

Ameritech users suffer delays, as do CLEC plan and DSL remote-terminal rollout.

By David Rohde
Network World, 11/27/00

CHICAGO - Roughly a year after its takeover of Midwest incumbent telephone company Ameritech, SBC Communications has little to show for it besides a mounting pile of complaints from consumers, business users, and state and federal regulators.

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The acquisitive mega-Bell says it is rushing in technicians from other parts of the country to help with service backlogs that it acknowledges piled up over the summer and fall. But many corporate network managers say their own Ameritech account representatives are telling them they've lost influence at SBC's Texas headquarters and can't guarantee when new capacity for T-1 lines and other circuits will be ready.

In addition, two key national initiatives that SBC executives insisted would result from its fusion with Ameritech - one for DSL service to users beyond the reach of central offices, the other a promise to compete with the other Bells on their own turf - are off to a very uneven start.

SBC's Midwest problems crested after Richard Mathias, chairman of the Illinois Commerce Commission, wrote SBC executives in September raising what he called "very grave questions as to the quality of service in Illinois by SBC/Ameritech."

The Federal Communications Commission followed with its own complaint in an Oct. 6 letter to SBC Group President James Calloway. FCC Common Carrier Bureau Chief Dorothy Atwood charged that SBC service had been "deteriorating" since it took over Ameritech and said users were "experiencing increasing installation delays, longer repair times and greater difficulties contacting SBC's [operating units]."

To stem the damage, SBC CEO Ed Whitacre went before regulators from all five Ameritech states gathered in Chicago on Oct. 16 and openly apologized. "I'm embarrassed to be here today because of installation and repair problems," he said, promising to send more people to the Midwest.

By transferring nearly 1,000 technicians from other parts of the company and stepping up hiring, SBC officials said last week they have cut the Ameritech installation and repair backlog from 210,000 tickets on Sept. 19 to 75,100 on Nov. 20. Almost all areas are now reporting out-of-service residential lines being repaired within 48 hours, SBC says.

But users say their problems persist. Jay Shell, senior network consultant for CareTech Solutions in Dearborn, Mich., says he has numerous orders that have been pending with Ameritech for T-1, fractional T-1 and frame relay access circuits for more than two months, some of which still don't have a firm installation date.

"I have noticed a severe degradation of service," says Shell, whose company links healthcare facilities to a data center in Troy, Mich., via an AT&T hybrid frame relay/ATM network that requires Ameritech dedicated-access lines.

Shell says that Ameritech is especially dragging its heels on circuits that are used for access to a long-distance carrier's point of presence, an opinion shared by others. One Sprint frame relay user who asked not to be identified says Ameritech personnel committed to install a dedicated access line to Sprint on Oct. 24, failed to show up, and subsequently told her it would take "a minimum of 20 weeks to get more bandwidth" to fill the order.

Similar problems have arisen in other SBC regions as the Bell giant has grown.

Ed Maguire, president of TeleSource, a network design and consulting firm in Baltimore, says one of his customers waited between four and six months for a frame relay circuit to be installed earlier this year by SBC. TeleSource, which also works with other regional Bell operating companies, usually waits about a month for T-1 provisioning, Maguire says.

The circuit was needed to connect four sites of the YMCA of Fort Worth, Texas.

Maguire says trying to get in touch with anyone at SBC to confirm installation dates has been almost impossible.

"You can't get anyone from SBC to return your calls," he says. "They seem to be thinned out and understaffed across the board."

Shortly after Maguire began calling SBC to get information on his order, he was told he would have to begin calling another number because the data division had been reorganized as a result of SBC's buyout of Ameritech.

"We made the calls, didn't have a contact name there, went into voice mail and never heard from anyone," Maguire says.

Other users say they've avoided trying new services as word has spread of Ameritech's woes. Bernard Fish, MIS manager for accounting firm BrookWeiner LLC in Chicago, says some local firms have had trouble with SBC's DSL provisioning. "We've avoided putting any lines in because we've heard about problems with installations," he says.

SBC spokesmen last week acknowledged that installation intervals have suffered because the company lost more Ameritech technicians than expected under an early-retirement buyout. They claim SBC has since added 2,700 nonmanagement positions.

But CareTech's Shell says account representatives also say "a lot of this is coming back to the fact that they have poor facilities, and they can't pull more cable." He adds that he's seen little evidence of new hires at Ameritech, and those who remain say they have little spending authority. "In a lot of ways you have to feel sorry for the people left at Ameritech," Shell says. "The good people are going to go where they have tools."

Telco service agents have also felt the crunch. Kevin Dunetz, chief technology officer of Telco Exchange, a Fairfax, Va., distributor of carrier services, says problems cropped up beginning in May after SBC split its DSL, frame relay and ATM businesses into a separate unit.

"We've gone from installs that used to take two or three weeks to installs that are taking a month or more," Dunetz says. "We're doing everything we can to put a good face on it [for Telco Exchange's customers], but there's no doubt the transition has not gone well."

A sense of powerlessness has even hit state regulators, who like federal officials negotiated conditions for SBC to take over Ameritech. At one meeting of the Ameritech state regulators that took place before Whitacre's Chicago appearance in October, William McCarty, chairman of the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission, demanded in personal terms that Whitacre send needed resources to the Midwest. "Spend the money, Ed!" McCarty yelled, according to the Chicago Tribune.

In one of his letters to Whitacre, Illinois Commissioner Mathias bluntly told SBC to forget about applying for long-distance authority in Illinois, as it has in three Southwestern Bell states. He advised SBC to "concentrate on improving the quality of service to its local exchange customers" first.

Still, SBC has long maintained that besides the long-distance opportunity, its additional financial muscle from acquiring Ameritech would result in other benefits. One is SBC's year-old Project Pronto to construct up to 25,000 DSL neighborhood terminals designed to knock out DSL distance restrictions to millions of consumer and business locations.

But Network World has learned that in a telephone conference call with competitive local exchange carriers (CLEC) two weeks ago, an SBC official said only a tiny number of users - reportedly 130 - now receive DSL service from Pronto remote terminals.

SBC spokesmen last week said they would not dispute the figure, noting that the FCC only recently "approved" Project Pronto. One spokesman could identify Pronto neighborhood terminals only in SBC territories other than Ameritech's, though he added that SBC has boosted the number of Ameritech DSL central offices to about 400.

FCC officials have complained that the only reason SBC needed "approval" for Pronto was that the carrier asked for a technical change regarding which of its subsidiaries could own the Pronto terminals, violating the conditions for the Ameritech takeover it signed just two weeks before Pronto was announced.

SBC officials last week also acknowledged they've had difficulty in at least one of their first three promised markets to become a CLEC competing with other Bells, another highly touted benefit of the SBC/Ameritech union. In the Boston area, in which SBC began service Oct. 1, the firm has only been able to collocate equipment in five of 10 expected Verizon central offices. SBC blames the recent Verizon strike, among other things, for the delay. SBC has also begun offering service as a CLEC in Miami and Seattle, with 27 more cities on its schedule in the next two years.