I signed up for Earthlink in October. I thought that the rate seemed pretty good, and since I had recently gone through a nightmare with Verizon, was in a non-ATT service area, and will not even touch Charter, I was left with little options as to who my ISP would be.
At first I was impressed how quickly my rep set up my account, however, the communication barrier was introduced even more quickly, as he failed to ship the modem to the requested address.
Even worse, when I did receive my modem (two days after my service was SUPPOSED to begin, and two days after I had began being charged for my service) I was unable to activate or install the service. I immediately contacted the company, who asked me several questions regarding the modem. The tech rep, who had an extremely difficult accent and did not understand me, was using technical terms that the average person would not understand. I asked him to explain it in more simple terms, and he proceeded to talk to me like I was a five year old. I was told that I would have to hire a third party technician to hook up the line for me, when supposedly, nothing like that was needed for my dry loop, landline free dsl.
Weeks later, after calling several companies who had no idea what I was talking about when I explained the situation, and after more calls to Earthlink's unknowledgable tech and CS reps via phone, email, and chat, I contact Verizon (who owns the phone lines) and was told that a dry loop line "dummy" line had to be installed in order for the service to work, but that they could not come out and do that unless Earthlink put in the order.
The next day, after over an hour of frustration with yet another non-understandable accent, I was told that Verizon would come out and check my lines. This Earthlink rep told me that my lines were activated on October 16th and that it was probably a problem with my phone line itself. This time, after some shouting, I was finally able to get them to understand me and have them put in an order with Verizon.
Verizon came the next day, checked the information for the line, and told me that a dummy line had already been installed previously on the line, however, that there was no service on the line because the customer (in this case Earthlink), had CANCELLED the service. This was 6 days before my service hit the 30 day cancellation period that I had.
The next day, I sent two letters to Earthlink, certified mail (with tracking and delivery confirmation), one to cancel the account, and one to refute the charges they had made to my credit card. Both letters were received prior to the 30 day period in which I had to dispute charges and cancel the account.
Fortunately, my credit card company put a hold on Earthlink from charging me, but not before they got one more charge in, which was not for $19.99, but almost $40 with several extra services that I never requested or authorized. I was also fortunate that my credit card company was able to get most of my money back.
To top all this off, Earthlink called me a couple days ago to let me know I had an outstanding balance of $149.99 (the amount for cancellation fee) and asked how I would like to pay for it. I told the rep about all the things that had happened, and her rebuttal was "you should have contacted customer service". I told her I had tried again and again, that Earthlink cancelled my service without notifying me, that I had never had service but had been charged for two months, and that they had received my notice of cancellation before my 30 day grace period was up. I then terminated the call, but I am expecting a lot more hassle to come my way from this ridiculous company!!!
Stay away from earthlink
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