Exactly a month after NTIA’s phone and online systems went live t...
Exactly a month after NTIA’s phone and online systems went live to accept the first DTV converter box coupon requests from consumers, demand for the coupons has subsided, as have many of the bugs and peculiarities that abounded when…
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Communications Daily is required reading for senior executives at top telecom corporations, law firms, lobbying organizations, associations and government agencies (including the FCC). Join them today!
we applied for coupons in the program’s first 40 hours (CD Jan 3 p2), our follow-up canvassing has found. Still, mixed messaging from customer service reps at NTIA’s call center and other problems continue to make for a program that’s less than perfect, we found. As we found when we tried applying the day the program went live on Jan. 1, phoning 888-DTV-2009 from a home phone with a listed number remains the speediest way of completing an application successfully. Phoning from a cellphone or unlisted landline inhibits the system from doing the automatic address lookup it so easily performs when an applicant calls from a listed home phone. There, an applicant, responding to automated voice prompts, must speak an address and name for the system to recognize. As we found a month ago, the system often gets hung up recognizing even common monosyllabic names. After several unsuccessful tries, the system redirects the calls to a live operator at the call center. But in contrast to the long waits we encountered at the program’s inception, response time now seems much quicker. Even phoning at off-peak hours, we waited at most two minutes for a rep to come on the line.