The Odyssey pt. 1-- leaving Bellsouth for Comcast

It all started four and a half weeks ago. My Internet service was down. This isn't an uncommon event with the Bellsouth service I've had since the early 90's, but this time it was different. I had dial tone on my DSL-connected phone; the first sign that something is wrong is usually a dead line. This time the problem wasn't my line or my modem (which has been replaced by Bellsouth four times); no, this time the problem was caused by Bellsouth.

I have a business line for which I pay $165 per month. This line provides me with a business phone number, Internet access, supposedly a 6Mb speed, and permanent static Internet IP addresses. I need these addresses and the high speed because I sometimes have to put systems online for my customers during projects. Well, on Saturday four weeks ago I had to do just that. I spent a day configuring a new system as a web server and for several other services using one of my permanent IP addresses. I put it online and discovered that I had no Internet service at all.

After an hour and a half of holding on the phone and answering idiotic questions such as "is the power turned on for your router," I finally discovered that Bellsouth had decided to reassign my permanent IP addresses. In case you don't have experience with these things, I'll use an analogy to explain... this is the equivalent of the US post office changing your address without telling you and proceeding to deliver all mail to... well... nowhere. Bellsouth had made no effort to even inform me of this change.

Here's how the technical support call proceeded:

Bellsouth: "There must be something wrong with your modem."
Me: "Well, I haven't changed anything."
Bellsouth: "Reset your modem to factory settings, and we'll reconfigure it from here."
Me: "OK- it's reset."
Bellsouth: "We can't seem to log into it ...." 40 minutes of random attempts and resetting goes by ... "you need to upgrade your firmware so we can get in..."
Me: "I will reconfigure from here, tell me what to do..."
Bellsouth: "OK- first, your IP address is 74.X.X.X ... use this subnet ... set this ..."
Me: "Why 74.X.X.X... my range is 68.X.X.X."
Bellsouth: "No, your static IP range is 74.X.X.X ..."

This is when we discovered the change. They insisted that I had always been using this new set of addresses they randomly assigned to me. It took until Sunday to get someone to admit that indeed my addresses were once something different. Then, when I asked to have them reassigned to the range I've had since the 90's, they first informed me that I'd only been a customer since 2003, and then informed me that reassignment to my old range would be impossible.

A week later, I still had no resolution of this issue. I spent every free minute on the phone calling them, having to tell my story from scratch each time, and being told various surprising things including:

"You don't have a DSL account with us."
"You requested the static IP range reassignment to 74.X.X.X last Saturday."
"Sorry, that number isn't on a business account..." we investigated this further and I was informed that my home number had been switched to the primary business account number, and had been put on something called a Ringmaster. According to them this was per my request a year ago. It wasn't. More on this in Part 2.

I also learned that if you follow all of the AT&T automated system requests while starting a call, 30% of the time you will end up right back where you started after putting in your phone number three times and being told to hold by three different voices.

After this experience, I decided that I could no longer trust AT&T as my Internet service provider, or even as the holder of my home phone number.

... continued in Part 2 ...