Posted at 7:25 p.m. PDT Tuesday, June 6, 2000

Pacific Bell e-mail crashes for almost 24 hours BY CHRIS O'BRIEN Mercury News

Pacific Bell's e-mail system crashed Monday and remained down for almost 24hours, leaving the company's Internet subscribers in Northern California fuming over thelatest in a series of problems with the service.

The company said the outage affected 144,000 of its approximately 330,000Internet subscribers. The glitch hit customers who subscribe to both Pac Bell'sdial-up Internet service and its high-speed digital subscriber line (DSL) service.

Though the problem was fixed by late Tuesday afternoon, customers say the continue to be frustrated by chronic troubles with the service, the time it generally takes to fix them and what they consider the inability to get answers to their questions from the company's customer service centers.

`If you look at e-mail and the roll it places in everyday life, it's anintegral part,'' said Jeffrey Hare, a San Jose attorney. `We're becoming very dependent onit. And the reliability of Pac Bell's service is very, very poor. They're not comingclean with what the problem really is.''

Hare uses a Pac Bell DSL line at his office in San Jose and discovered theproblem when the e-mail went down around 8:30 p.m. on Monday. He called Pac Bell's customerservice line and was told it would be up shortly, but found it was still down the nextmorning. He called customer service again and was disconnected. After calling a thirdtime, he spoke with a supervisor who said they didn't know when the problem would be fixed.

By late Tuesday, an exasperated Hare wasn't sure what else he could do orwhere else he could turn.

`The consumer really has no options,'' Hare said. `You call Pac Bell and youget the run-around. The Web site doesn't give enough information. And nobodyregulates the Internet service.''

Rodd Aubrey, a Pac Bell spokesman, said the latest problem was caused byhardware but couldn't say what had caused the glitch and declined to name the company that provided the equipment. By late Tuesday afternoon, service had been restored,although the company said it would still be several hours before customers would receive theirundelivered e-mail.

But that was little comfort to Charles Faltz, director of professionalaffairs for the California Psychological Association. Faltz works at home and gets between150 and 250 e-mails each day, most related to work. When the system is down, Faltz said many ofthe people sending him e-mail don't know he's not receiving it.

Faltz said Pac Bell's e-mail and DSL service, which he pays $39.95 a monthfor, is so unreliable that he kept his dial-up account which costs an additional $21.95each month just in case he needs to get online and send e-mail.

`I so frequently need a backup with Pac Bell Internet,'' Faltz said.The Pac Bell Internet service has experienced multiple problems in recentmonths.

In February, the e-mail system malfunctioned for almost a week, leavingthousands of customers unsure whether e-mail was missing or being sent or was beingdelayed. In January, the service suffered another e-mail snafu along with a break-in by someteenage crackers. In April, DSL customers experienced widespread outages while some Pac BellInternet customers found mail from their accounts was being blocked by America Online because itwas labeled in a way that made it look like spam.

Customers may have some hope for a long-term solution. Pac Bell's parentcompany, SBC Communications of San Antonio, recently decided to merge its consumer and small-business-oriented Internet service provider business with Prodigy, one of the nation's largest Internet providers

http://www.sjmercury.com/breaking/docs/046159.htm

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), June 07, 2000