XO a.k.a. Concentric

XO used to be called Concentric. Among other things, they are a consumer dial-up ISP

Spamming a New Customer

January 29, 2002. Someone I know signed up as a new XO customer in October 2001. This person really wanted web access and did not care much about email. However, we noticed that this person got quite a lot of email even though the email account was never used to send a single message. All the mail was spam. At first, there were two to four messages a day.

The obvious conclusion, although I have no proof, is that XO (or someone working at XO) sold the new email address to spammers.

February 17, 2002. As an example of the spam and its frequency, below is the inbox from the account in question. There are eight messages from Saturday February 16th, another eight from the 15th, only two on the 14th (Valentine's Day) and nine on Wednesday the 13th. To repeat, the owner of this XO dial-up account has never sent anyone an email message since the account was created.

Signing Up as a New Customer

June 2, 2001. I tried to sign up today as a new XO customer for dial-up Internet access. I couldn't. My tale of woe occurred around 9:00 PM Eastern Time.

You can not sign up with XO on their web site. For an Internet company this is disgraceful.

The phone number for the sales department is (800) 939-4262. I called it and followed the computer prompts to sign up as a new customer. My call was transferred to a voice mail box that was not accepting messages. Then it hung up on me. Maybe the sales office is closed? There was no recording saying this, it just hung up. The exact sequence of events was that the call was transferred to an attendant, then it said extension 7801 does not subscribe to voicemail, then it said "good-bye" and hung up.

To speak to a person and find out when the sales office is open I called the support number for their consumer dial-up service (800) 745-2747. This number is for existing customers only, however a person there said that the sales department does not work on the weekends. He confirmed that you can not sign up on their web site, but offered a tip - the Internet Connection Wizard in Windows 98 can be used to open a new account electronically.

One of the telephone options on their dial-up support line is to check the status of a "pop site." To most dial-up ISP customers a "pop site" is a place that sells ice cream. No wonder AOL has so many more customers than XO. If you don't know, "pop" is a techie abbreviation for "point of presence." This roughly translates to a room with a bunch of modems whose job it is to answer the phone when you dial onto the Internet. Rather than providing the room temperature or location, what this function actually does is tell you whether a local dial-up access number is working or not.

My first attempt at using the Internet Connection Wizard under Windows 98 failed. It could not dial the Microsoft Internet Referral Service (888) 551-3447. The modem definition on the machine was fine. It had been used many times to dial another ISP.

The second attempt to reach the Microsoft Internet Referral Service worked. It shows a list of ISPs in my area. The list included Concentric, someone never updated the name to XO. I was lucky to know that the two names refer to the same company. I entered my name, address and credit card number.

Then the wizard dialed Concentric at (800) 997-4227. I chose a userid (which is limited to only eight characters, quite archaic) and a password at the first Concentric window. At the next window, you chose a local access phone number. Don't ask me what comes after that.

The first time I clicked on the NEXT button the Internet Connection Wizard could not communicate with Concentric. It got an unspecified error. Re-trying a second time resulted in the same error again. Re-trying a third time resulted in nothing. The wizard hung. I was connected but there was no data flowing over the connection. After 8 minutes I cancelled the request. Unlike the last failure, this time the wizard could not retry from where it left off. It was back to square one for the wizard and there was no way I was entered my credit card number again.

Now that I might be a customer, I called consumer dial-up support line again. They had no record of the account I just tried to create. However, I was told that it takes a few hours to update the database. They need new DBAs.

June 3, 2001

I called the sales number again today and got hung up on in the same manner. XO customer service for existing customers had no record of the account I tried to establish. My credit card had no new charges. What a waste of time.

June 4, 2001

The sales office was open today and I was able to sign up without problems.

Page last updated: February 18, 2002