The only thing that (finally) got them to accelerate the roll out of DSL in Illinois was Comcast and the other cable companies beginning to eat their lunch.

After 6 years in a community of several hundred residences less than two miles from a town that does have DSL service, they still couldn't be bothered to drop in a local junction (I'm forgetting my terminology; whatever box it is that can take the place of a local switching center these days in providing DSL service) so that I and my neighbors would be within what they consider an acceptable range for service. This was a couple of years ago; I haven't bothered to check since.

A few towns further downstate finally got so frustrated that they made plans to roll their own connectivity. AT&T took them to court and lobbied the state legislature to prevent them from proceeding.

Back before my last move, I had DSL from SBC (maybe at that time still Ameritech/SBC; and which has since purchased the AT&T name). Phoning up to place the order, the call was answered within a few seconds. Installation itself took three scheduled visits, each requiring a half-day window of my availability (so, off from work), before someone actually showed up to fill the order. Then, they did an absolute crap job, leaving a bare wire-to-wire connection hanging on the ouside of the building. My downstairs neighbor had a friend stop by who was an actual line technician for the telephony part of SBC. That fellow was kind enough to go up and clean up and tape over that connection, as a favor to his friend. Turns out the DSL installers they were sending out were subcontractors.

After that, connectivity would go down frequently. When it was up, traceroute would show a blank-awful lot of bouncing around SBC servers (sometimes close to 10, perhaps more) before a request escaped to the internet. One time when I called for service, I reached a nice support tech who was at the point of boiling over (at the situation, not me). She described how they were subcontractors who filed tickets that were then serviced by other subcontractors (IIRC). When people called up, there was literally nothing more she could do than file a ticket, and she could get no further feedback on the status of that ticket.

I ended up spending about thirty minutes talking to her as she calmed down. It didn't matter with respect to her keeping her job; she'd decided to leave her position the following week. I feel a little guilty that this tied her up, but she just needed someone to vent to after banging her head against the proverbial wall of SBC tech support for too long.

SBC, now AT&T, is one of the few companies I have an immediate aversion to giving any business whatsoever. I know some individual employees who are just fine. But management, particularly senior management and the policies they promulgate, are simply evil.

I hesitate a bit to post this. HN generally isn't a place I consider griping appropriate. But this company's behavior serves such an exemplary role of how not to do business (unless you are a de facto regional monopoly (as they were at that time) and part of a national oligarchy), that it is perhaps instructional.

Oh, and it's been a while, but IIRC SBC was given many millions of dollars in concessions and dismissal of legal charges, in return for their agreement, among other things, to accelerate and thoroughly roll out statewide high speed Internet (DSL). The above description is an example of how they failed to honor this commitment. Instead, they spent their time lobbying the state legislature to have the terms of the agreement altered to exempt them from having to honor it. One example of another lesson demonstrated repeatedly in the state and region: Such concessions, tax breaks, etc. rarely pay off for the states and communities that make them.

I have no great love for any of the major telcos, nor the major cable companies (shudder), but the Death Star is in a class unto itself.