Ameritech Suffers From DSL Network Outages By Adam Fendelman, ePrairie CHICAGO, ILLINOIS, U.S.A., 04 Oct 2000, 10:42 PM CST

The reportage of Ameritech customers with DSL outages is anything but hush-hush. Today, Ameritech tech support agents confirmed that the outages are "regular," and claim that Ameritech's infrastructure can't handle the load. Ameritech spokespeople, though, tell a different story.

The Ameritech tech reps say the load can't be handled because it wasn't built to - as if the megatelco didn't forsee the rave usage of DSL at home.

When you're home and surfing and suddenly realize you can't surf, the techs say it's not happenstance that the Ameritech network "went down." The company took it down, they tell ePrairie.

While company spokespeople unsurprisingly deny the regular take-down of its DSL and say such outages are "rare," the company does take its e-mail servers down for regular maintenance late at night about twice a week, according to Ameritech spokesperson Blair Klein.

She also says that while Ameritech certainly has had network issues and DSL has gone down, outages only occur resulting from equipment problems. She adds: "We have a network very capable of handling more customers than we have."

While many players have to be involved to bring DSL to the home, customers with outages only see that they can't surf the Web or use e-mail. "That's a valid point, and were sitting all the players down on a regular basis to minimize the problems," Klein said.

For Ameritech, these players include Advanced Solutions, Inc. (ASI), a subsidiary of SBC Communications, which provides the DSL service on Ameritech's lines and has a regional sales office in Wheaton, Ill. Also, companies such as UUNet, a WorldCom company, serve as Ameritech's Internet backbone.

Whether the service goes down as much as every other day as some say, or "rarely" as others profess, the timing isn't always best.

At the Internet Street Fair in Chicago September 9 put on by First Tuesday and SoGO, which was "Internetless" because Ameritech's lines "went down", the timing couldn't have been worse. The showcasing of Chicago's best tech companies interspersed among 200 booths couldn't... showcase. At least not with Web access.

Reported by ePrairie.com, http://www.eprairie.com .

http://www.newsbytes.com/pubNews/00/156197.html

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), October 05, 2000