AT&T's massive outage shows how not to do customer service in social media age

AT&T's U-verse service (disclosure, I'm a customer) has had massive outages across the country -- apparently -- for a day or more. The company's response shows how not to do customer service in today's social media world (or one that, just in general, relies on that internet pipe).

I say "apparently" because AT&T has been less than forthcoming in what it's telling people.  You won't find anything on the company's much-touted @ATTCares account on Twitter.

Its @Uverse account is nothing but marketing

What few statements have come from AT&T PR folks have been opaque

The tech support site has a canned statement

And canned chat

The best info is coming from third-party sites like downdetector.com

This probably should be taught as a textbook case study in business and communications schools about how not to handle things in 2016. (I'm also fascinated that it seems few news organizations seem to have picked up on how widespread these problems seem to be.)

Still working on getting the Internet thingy

Ah, there are times that the local McClatchy paper, the Columbia (S.C.) State, underlines the struggle of "getting it" online.

See my tale of a fish chart on Tumblr.

60 seconds in the digital age

These two infographics about what happens online in 60 seconds are pretty interesting.

I always tend to take such things that average numbers with a little grain of salt, but even so, some of the numbers are impressive:

• 370,000 Skype voice calls
• 695,000 Facebook updates
• 600 YouTube videos
• 1,820 terabytes of data created

AT&T Internet - RIP DSL? Pony up for the changes

If you are an AT&T DSL user, I suspect you will be getting a notice before long telling you to pony up for new service under AT&T's U-verse.

AT&T has issued new terms of service making clear it can force you to convert to the costlier U-verse system when it wants to. It would appear to be part of the telco's larger strategy to pump some more growth into the higher-margin fiber networks and offset loss of DSL customers to cable operators.

So what do you get? Well, you do get higher speeds - AT&T touts 3 MB download speeds for its U-verse level that roughly equates to the same DSL level that's at 1.5MB. But it's also about 15 percent more expensive (after the 12-month discount), and you will get hit for a $100 bill for installation. See this from AT&T's pricing site.

All of this, of course, is part of a larger shift in phone service in which AT&T is playing "who blinks first" with the FCC and is preparing for the end of copper-wire service in favor of IP.

Not surprisingly, AT&T is putting some limits on usage as well (although it is fairly generous):

Are there any usage limits for my broadband service?
Yes.  As of May 2, 2011, AT&T's residential DSL High Speed Internet plans will have a usage allowance of 150 Gigabytes ("GB") per month, and its residential U-verse High Speed Internet plans will have a usage allowance of 250 Gigabytes ("GB") per month.  The usage allowance is the amount of data you can send and receive each month.

It's an extra $10 per 50GB.

For now, you'll be getting an e-mail telling you about the new TOS. It's probably worth sucking up the tendency to glaze over and spend the time reading it. (And AT&T has put up a site for you to monitor your usage: http://www.myusage.att.com/)

Burkeman sets us thinking about virtual-physical merger

There's a lot of hype and, frankly, a lot of dreck, that comes out of South by Southwest - it has to be so when the program is 300+ pages.

There's some good stuff, too. And then there are those few pieces that make you go, "Wow, that really pulls this all together." Such is The Virtual and the Physical Worlds are no Longer Separate By Oliver Burkeman of the Guardian and featured on Paid Content.

Aside from being a very good piece of writing with just that touch of British disdain or snark (my students, please note), it's one of those rare pieces that really sets my brain racing and going, yeah, yeah.

The ah ha moment came about a third of the way in:

If Web 2.0 was the moment when the collaborative promise of the internet seemed finally to be realised – with ordinary users creating instead of just consuming, on sites from Flickr to Facebook to Wikipedia – Web 3.0 is the moment they forget they’re doing it. When the GPS system in your phone or iPad can relay your location to any site or device you like, when Facebook uses facial recognition on photographs posted there, when your financial transactions are tracked, and when the location of your car can influence a constantly changing, sensor-driven congestion-charging scheme, all in real time, something has qualitatively changed.

 I recommend you take it for a spin and see what you get out of it.

Internet stats resource?

Came across this set of Internet statistics from an outfit called Pingdom, a website monitoring service.

http://royal.pingdom.com/2011/01/12/internet-2010-in-numbers

Take it FWIW, but at least this outfit does list its sources at the bottom, so A+ for transparency.

Pointer from Resource Shelf.

Nielsen: Let folks see passwords they're typing

Web usabilty expert Jakob Nielsen is out today with a call to eliminate password "masking" -- you know, that row of asterisks or bullets you get when you type your password into a Web form.

He makes a lot of sense.

Nielsen argues that masking passwords makes people less confident and more error-prone, and ultimately less likely to log in on your site. That might be a stretch. But I think his second argument is right on point:

The more uncertain users feel about typing passwords, the more likely they are to (a) employ overly simple passwords and/or (b) copy-paste passwords from a file on their computer. Both behaviors lead to a true loss of security.

As for fears of someone looking over your shoulder while you type, Nielsen essentially calls that balderdash.

Apple, for instance, has an option you can click when entering a wireless encryption password that lets you see all those mind-numbing hexadecimal characters as you type them in. And if you were afraid someone was looking over your shoulder, you could unclick it.

I think that's a great idea online.

Broadband access grows

Pew is out with a report that says almost two-thirds of Americans now have broadband access - up 15 percent from a year ago. The average price also is up - to $39 from $34.50 a year ago.

Inernet as news 'source'?

This lede from the Pew Research Center:

The internet, which emerged this year as a leading source for campaign news, has now surpassed all other media except television as a main source for national and international news.

Hmmm, Internet as news "source"?

It seems to me there's a fundamental terminology problem here.

While newspapers are, yes, a "medium," generally a newspaper (for reasons largely having to do with the cost of presses, ink, paper and distribution) is merely the outward embodiment of a news organization -- the actual "source." Likewise "television." So we can comingle the terminology without doing too much damage to clarity (though we still seriously dent accuracy).

But the Internet is the outward embodiment of .... what? Well, news organizations, yes. But also aggregation sites, bloggers, pr agencies, ad agencies, corporations -- technically, anyone with a computer. To call the Internet a "source" really does start to mangle the term.

In this context, newspaper, television and online are all methods of distribution - media. But perhaps it's time to re-examine our looseness with the language when it comes to online. If Pew is going to talk about sources, it needs to start breaking out what those specific sources are online, at least by type.

I'm not suggesting this as any sop to newspapers or broadcasters. I am suggesting we no longer really can be this sloppy with the terminology.

Nice pice of interactive-J -- on both ends

PC Magazine has produced a nice piece of interactive journalism, using cyber crowdsourcing to then produce clickable regional maps showing how abysmal "high speed" Internet service really is in this country.

For the crowdsourcing part, PC Mag asked people to download and run its SurfSpeed app. It then compiled the information into the regional breakouts. (SurfSpeed is not a bandwidth meter but instead tries to mimic real-world surfing behavior.)

One of the conclusions: Cable generally is better than DSL - faster and with more satisfied customers.

You can't spell "high speed" with "U.S."

Excellent article in the Wall Street Journal today (Net Gain) that lays out pretty starkly why high speed Internet service in the U.S. largely - well let's just say it -- sucks.

Unfortunately, the piece by Christopher Rhoads is going to be behind a pay wall for many, so some quick facts and figures:

• Average monthly cost per megabit of speed:
• U.S. $12.60
• Japan $3.09, France $3.70, U.K. $5.29 (selected prices)
  
• Percentage of households with broadband
• U.S. 57%
• South Korea 93%, Iceland 83%, Switzerland 74% (selected countries)
• Average broadband download speeds
• U.S. 4.9 Megabits/sec.
• Average of 21 countgries 9.2 Mbs
• Japan 63.6, S. Korea 49.5, Canada 7.6, Germany 6.0, U.K. 2.6

As Rhoads points out, upload speeds, which are critical for high-tech businesses and research, are even slower -- far slower -- in the U.S.

The article is built around the attempt by Chattanooga to lay its own fiber-optic system, part of which already is in place and brings vastly higher speeds to some local businesses. Comcast has sued the city to stop the project, arguing that it is an unfair cross-subsidy and use of taxpayer money.

Both Comcast and AT&T say they are improving their networks. Check it out:

• A Comcast spokeswoman says the company recently increased its speeds for small businesses to 16 megabits a second in many markets, including in Chattanooga, and upload speeds to two megabits.
• AT&T (the other major provider in Chattanooga) says it now offers small businesses a download speed of six megabits a second, and upload of 512 kilobits a second.

Whoa there, Hoss. Speed kills! 512 kbs uploads. Impressive - not. 2 Mbs is not all that impressive either.

Imagine, just imagine, what newspapers and TV stations might be facing if the U.S. had speeds as in much of the rest of the developed world. If they haven't sent the cable and telcom companies flowers, they should. Then they should get very scared and very busy because these speeds will come -- eventually.

The telcom and cable companies have explanations -- other countries are more densely populated, for instance, and so it's cheaper to serve them. Verizon and AT&T are rolling out very high speed fiber in some cities and Comcast is moving toward a much faster system, but it is too little and too slow if we don't want to watch the rest of the world speed by.

Verizon's top speed of 30 Mbs down and 15 Mbs up will set you back $140/month. That's still $9.33 per Mbs. AT&T's top speed is 10 Mbps up and 1.5 down. It's hard to figure a price since AT&T is bundling it with various TV services in packages that range from $77 per month to more than $132. (Let's assume the lowest cost and next-to-highest speed of 6 Mbs, which is probably unrealistic since prices start at $77 -- but that's still $12.83 per Mbs. And using the entirely unrealistic highest-speed, lowest price comparison, that's still $7.70.)

The cost remains a huge barrier. As noted here back in January, at least one group (in Louisville) has cited high telecommunications costs as one of the contributing factors to the home foreclosure mess.