Latest DSL Outage Highlights Woes Encountered by Subscribers

An unspecified “network problem” has triggered a widespread outage of GTE Inc.’s high-speed Internet service for more than two days, leaving hundreds of the phone company’s customers in California, Washington and Oregon without their digital subscriber line connections.

The problem, which was fixed late Wednesday, was caused by a software bug in equipment used by GTE Internetworking, the Internet service provider run by GTE.

The outages affected only customers using GTE Internetworking as their ISP. GTE customers using DSL with an unaffiliated ISP were not affected.

GTE is not the only company grappling with network woes. Pacific Bell recently suffered DSL outages in the San Francisco area, and subscribers to various high-speed cable modem services have regularly complained of erratic connections.

The problems come at a time when phone and cable companies are stepping up efforts to sell DSL and cable modem services to customers hungry for fast and relatively inexpensive Internet access from home.

SBC Communications, which owns California-based PacBell, said this week that it will spend $6 billion to expand its DSL service within its 13-state territory.

Meanwhile, AT&T; is investing heavily to upgrade its newly purchased cable networks to broaden sales of its cable modem service, which comes with Internet access from either Excite@Home or Road Runner.

Nationwide, hundreds of thousands of consumers have responded, flocking to sign up for the super-fast, “always on” services wherever they are available.

But the GTE outage highlights the reality awaiting newcomers to DSL and cable modems: The speedy connections are great when they work, but they are far from “always on.”

GTE itself seems to underscore that fact. On its DSL customer support line, the company tells callers to press 1 “for a recording of the current outages and scheduled maintenance.”

Alan Silverman of Culver City has been calling that line often. He switched to GTE’s DSL service after a bad experience with MediaOne’s cable modem offering--and promptly encountered still more problems.

“When I signed up in January, GTE was very confident in their ability to provide a continuous service. But every few months, there are outages . . . and in the past 10 days or so, there have been at least five outages,” said Silverman, a radio feature writer who uses the high-speed connections to transmit radio segments to stations around the world.

With DSL, he can send a typical radio piece to its destination in about 12 minutes. With a dial-up telephone modem--which he used during the DSL outage--it takes more than an hour.

“Maybe it was naivete on my part, but my feeling was that GTE is a big company and I can rely on them,” Silverman said.

But customers may find they have little recourse when it comes to DSL service snags.

“At this point, there aren’t any guarantees with DSL because it’s a new technology that’s evolving,” said John Vincenzo, a spokesman for GTE Internetworking. He added that there are no immediate plans to offer rebates to customers affected by the outage.

“Any new technology is going to have problems associated with it, so people should not have undue faith in PacBell and GTE because of their size and position when it comes to DSL,” said Bob Larribeau, chairman of the California Broadband Users Group, which caters to consumers using a range of Internet access technologies. “I would make sure to have a dial-up modem for backup.”