In recent years, life for AT&T customers has gotten hard. Times have been tough for a lot of people economically and the rates have gotten a little higher, but we still faithfully subscribe to what AT&T has to offer. In return, we'd like to ask that AT&T:

- Let customers have DSL if it's available.

An unsettlingly clear trend has started to come up for AT&T DSL users across the country - many users asking for service will simply be turned away with the excuse that they have no more ports available; that the equipment is over capacity, even if local technicians say otherwise. Even if someone else had service in the same location just days earlier. We would like to ask that AT&T be more forthright in letting us know what is available where, or stop holding potential customers hostage and allow other carriers to serve markets that AT&T can't.

- Let us keep the phone service of our choice.

When improved DSL services such as Uverse are rolled out, AT&T will sometimes make aggressive attempts to switch people to their Digital Voice service, and make it difficult for new users to order phone service. Because of the technologies involved in DV service, issues such as packet loss, jitter, latency and reduced reliability come into play. These all make it harder to speak on the phone, the whole point of having a phone. Because it legally isn't phone service, it also doesn't carry the consumer protections normal phone service does. Bottom line, if we don't want Digital Voice, we'd like AT&T to respect that choice.

- Fix outages in a timely manner.

Natural disasters definitely haven't been kind to a lot of communities. But whenever they disrupt power, gas or cable service, the utilities are always quick to get things back into shape. It's rare that a power outage will exceed a few days without becoming news. But recently, we've seen some phone and internet outages that've taken weeks or even a month to fix. We need repairs to be much more timely.

- Recognize that we prefer wired service at home and work.

We've been nothing short of amazed to see the advancements in wireless technology over the past thirty years, and have nothing but respect for AT&T's involvement in making them a reality. But we also realize that physics is a tough master; unlike fiber or a pair of wires, there's severe limits to how much spectrum you can use, how reliable it can be, and where it can reach. When we're at home or work, we prefer a wired connection to keep our internet consistently fast and free of low usage caps, and our conversations from becoming reenactments of the "Can you hear me now?" commercials.

We would like to make clear that we are not necessarily asking for new, expensive rollouts - just, much like any other utility, that the services we've had for years be kept in good working order and be as available as they always have been.