It only took a week. Wait, let me say that again. IT ONLY TOOK A WEEK!!!!!!!!

Like everyone else, AT&T uses a propriety modem (called a residential gateway) made my motorola powered by 2wire to access their service. As with any piece of hardware, it's gonna fail at some point. Sadly, the failure rate with most of these is pretty high. I got lucky, mine lasted a year.

It died last Friday. Sort of. It came back to life briefly on Saturday then died again. Convincing Tier I support to send a tech out took 12 phone calls. That's nearly 6 hours on the phone doing the same thing over and over and over and get the same result over and over and over.

Insanity : doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Tech finally came out Monday evening and replaced the RG. I failed to have him check the TV receivers as it never crossed my mind that they might be special as well. Turns out the RG and the TV boxes are so special that the techs don't always know about it. At least I had internet. It took about 12 hours for it to resync and become fully active again.

Fast forward to Wednesday. Another tech but he can't make anything work. He switches out one of the TV boxes only to be told by Tier I that there is a hold on the account so that won't work. The real problem ... The RG won't let the TV boxes sync if you configure it for Router behind Router functionality. This makes no sense to me but whatever. Upon disconnecting my router (which connects the rest of my computers) and waiting for the other TV box to sync everything returned to normal.

I had to place another call to Tier I, repeatedly tell them over and over again that I needed the box re-provisioned and waste 30 minutes before they would finally say, "Yeah, I can't help you. Let me transfer you to Tier II."

I really wish there was someway to flag my account so that I could just skip Tier I when I call. I never call unless it's a real problem. And transferring to another provider won't really help as it's all the same. Technology wise everyone in my area is equal (AT&T vs TWC) and they all have horrible customer service. And since TWC just went to metered rates I'd end up paying more with them than I do with AT&T.

I may not be switching but I can guarantee that I won't be recommending them either.