I worked in high-tech support for five years. BBB complaints get replied to with "customer had unrealistic expectations in regards to product/service" and the BBB goes away.

And, truth to be told, as far as the company is concerned you *do* have unrealistic expectations about the performance you will get with DSL. Their entire network/sales/product structure is geared toward the casual user who's too impatient to wait 4 minutes for that n00d pic of Britney. Anybody who wants to actually *use* the system is considered an enemy. Add the facts that your telco won't start making money off you as a DSL customer for two years (the way I understand it is because people are too cheap to pay the telco what DSL is worth, they sell it at a ~3% margin or something -- the telco would make probably 40x as much if you kill your DSL line and order a 2nd phone line for modem use), they've already oversubscribed/overcommitted 5fold or more, and that there are 9 trillion people lined up behind you to take it up the ass for high-speed net access, and you'll get a pretty good idea as to why the customer service rep would just as soon tell you to fuck off as anything else. At least the next customer in the queue might have an easy problem to fix...

Support is a big black hole into which the company throws money with no hope of ever seeing any return. You can argue till you're blue in the face that good support saves the company money in the long run, but the top brass and investors only see the number at the end of the quarter that says "you spent waaaaay too much money here." As a result, it's impossible to afford to pay people who actually have a clue to do support. Those who do have any aptitude generally are fresh out of high school and are using this to springboard their careers in the tech industry. They take the job, get the certs, and move on up to be the incompetent MIS guy at the company that you work for. Those that don't burn out in anywhere from 6 weeks to 3 months. The most grizzled vets have been around for 6 months or even a year.

Funnily enough, when they are polled about it most customers say that they think that fast response time == good support. They don't care if they get the right answer. They don't care if they get an answer to their question at all. All they care is that there is a warm body and not some God-damned machine answering their phone call within 45 seconds on average. This leads to staffing the phones and manning the email stations with as many low-paid, barely-trained monkeys as possible. After all, speed == service.

Next time you're having a problem with a support call, just remember that the guy you're talking to who's tripping all over himself trying to work the phone is probably making somewhere between 8 and 11 bucks an hour to be cannon fodder. He's also already dealt with 47 irate people with completely different and unreasonable problems right before you. Expecting him to actually be able to fix your problem is putting more faith in the human race than it deserves.

:/

Support sucks. Customers' expectations of what support should be are unrealistic when compared to how much they think they should have to pay for a product. Then again, so is their expectation of what quality vs price should be, so it's not really all that surprising...

Oh, and just FYI -- complaining to a rep about hold times is one of the stupidest things you can do if you actually want to get helped. They're either an outsourced call center, in which case they're going to get pissed that you're reminding them that they're fucking up the 3-minute-hold-time clause in their contract, or they actually work for the company, in which case they'll just add it to the list of reasons they hate you (#1 being that you bought their product in the first place.)

Other stupid things to do include asking for a supervisor right off the bat, saying "I'm not technical," complaining about what an idiot the last guy you talked to was, saying "I know more than you about computers so stfu and let me drive," admitting that you're a doctor/lawyer/engineer, using the words "I am going to sue you," or pretty much anything else that's not "I did something dumb. Please oh please will you deign to fix it for me?"

So, um, good luck with Telocity and stuff.

:/

I'm such a fucking fatalist...