Wednesday, August 15, 2001

In response to Steve White's letter about auto-pay for AT&T Broadband, let me say first off that I have no objections to paying bills on line. In fact I pay my AT&T phone bill that way (and there is no charge, by the way).

The difference is that I trust the phone company to keep things going smoothly with little disruption to their service. Not so with the cable service. It's been a constant struggle since the days of Wometco and little has changed.

My area was changed to broadband July 27. My set hasn't worked right since. Channels are missing or fuzzy and no one seems to care. It took seven days and four calls to even get someone to come and look at it and then they said they couldn't fix it; I have to wait for a maintenance man to come, and should be patient. Meanwhile I get about eight less channels than before broadband. And a call as I write this from AT&T tells me I have to wait until the Aug. 6, four more days from today before maintenance can come out. But then, they told me three other times, they'd be there that day and didn't. Patience, they say!

So, as I've done in the past, I refuse to pay for any days that I don't get full service. And if they don't like that, there's always satellite service. But if I signed up for auto-pay, fat chance of getting money back then.

Vern Johnson

Fayetteville

Back to Opinion Home Page | Back to the top of the page