Don't Count on Using AT&T DSL With Linux

You sign up via phone, give them your credit card number, high-tail down to th store and buy yourself a DSL modem, hook it up, use the temporary user name and password to get online, and then go to set up your permanent user name and password. ActiveX, insert a CD, what? That's right, you can't register for a service you are already paying for unless you are running Windows. "What if I get on my Mac (I didn't tell her this Mac was purely hypothetical, I don't got one)." "I think there is a separate devision in our fee-for-service support that does that. "Is there anyone else I can talk to?" After another 15 minutes on hold I get a new tier -2 support tech, but at least this one has some common sense. She calls billing to verify I am who I claim to be. Fifteen minute wait. In the end her and Billing decide the only information they have that they can verify me by is my street address. After that I can hear her mutter to herself and can tell she is running through the ActiveX applet on my end. I tell her a username and a throw-away password, the last 4 of my SSN, set some awesomely secure security questions "favorite pet? That's going to be KlekZ3~x04!?," and then finally I have the DSL username and password.

So the moral of the story is if you are persistent, don't believe anything the AT&T folks say, are highly technical, and are OK with someone else agreeing to the TOS on your behalf, hey it's easy, it just takes 53 minutes.

And what should AT&T do? Either fix their system so that you can sign up without ActiveX and without browser sniffing and without a special CD that I highly doubt contains a Linux setup guide, or provide a free on-site tech to come out and set up the account since they want to ensure it is done on hardware and software that meet their specifications, which is not enumerated by the person you call to sign up, and which should play no roll in the business agreement between me and my ISP.

Anyone Billionaires at Canonical want to take up these kinds of things for the cause? Wanna talk about reasons why this year isn't the year of Linux on the Desktop? Here is one, there are thousands like it. Four or five people full-time (because this kind of work is boring as dirt, trust me, I just spent 53 minutes doing it) helping sympathetic individuals file appropriate help-desk tickets within their organizations and passing out kudos and warnings to deserving individuals might go a long way.