Subsequent to Open Reach last Saturday concluding that I have a semi shorted intermittent cable fault, I am receiving text messages from BT India asking if my fault has gone away. There is of course, no way to contact them easily. So I went through the 151 routine again and explained to them what the problem was. It was a total waste of time, as the droid had no idea what it was doing, or what had been done and insisted on sending along yet another OR guy this afternoon who confirmed the findings of the last one. When I was foolish enough to ask when the road would be dug up, I was told by OR that that was down to BT who are the service provider. The engineers concerned confirmed my suspicions in that India is totally out of touch with on the ground problems and OR are sent on wild goose chases because of the incompetent BT fault management system. It would seem that there is no way to get an answer as to when the service will be provided from BT. Just to add to the fun, BT India send me text messages and voice mail over the faulty line! Customer service is not their forte! They are definitely afraid of email and this also seems to apply to Plusnet.
In the future try a cheaper telecoms provider like Talk-Talk. This will reset your expectations and hence be less upsetting when the service fails like this.
Some time back I visited a friend in Seville, Spain and he had broadband connected in his villa. The telephone wiring outside was very untidy and ADSL barely worked. I asked about the service provider, Telefonica, and got laughed at. Seems not many Spaniards also hold that company's workers in good stead, so they just "accept it".
Why not? Life is too short.
Mobile phones work, and for limited gigabytes per month, broadband use of them is acceptable. A wired line is probably of necessary use if into media streaming in a major way, otherwise not so.
Yup. Of the 5 I'd had over the years (mostly as the result of takeovers) TalkTalk was the worst by some margin. And you certainly made use of their help line. Which was also the worst of the bunch.
Since Plusnet is a bt company now I suggest this is quite normal. Another issue about digging up the road is nowadays they need a permit from both the local authority and the highways agency to do this, which as you can imagine is not a peedy process if its a major road particularly. In fact BT and other phone providors are constantly being fined for digging up things ehen thy do not have permission or making the work site dangerous, ie routing pedestrians into the road with no barriers for indicating this to ocoming traffic etc.
Incidentally what is this Vodafone advert about banishing phone rental charges, are they saying they are making phones over voip systems. the last time I tried one of this sort of telephones thae quality was terrible and dialing often misdialed completely so I'm once bitten etc. Brian
I have to say myself that I've had nothing but good service from Virgin media. They come when they say they will and even rewire whole sections of a street to get the line back up again. its a little dearer than bt, but in this world i think you get what you pay for. Companies who are always having offers to get people on their system obviously compromise on something. People on the ground cost money as faults cannot be predicted and hence they can be busy one minute and not the next. Brian
Indeed they are. But they operate semi-autonomously, and you can speak to someone with a Yorkshire accent in Sheffield rather than an Indian accent in Bangalore!
*And* you can get them to reply in writing if you raise a ticket - although they do their best to hide that option on their website.
If you really need a help line that often, find a more reliable service provider.
BTW, the very best customer service I ever had came from a guy with IIRC a Dutch accent. I'd rather have someone who can help *me* regardless of their origin.
If you check, you will find Vodafone are actually cheaper £9 per month lower than BT and Sky.
Vodafone are really just starting out on fibre BB, following a £17 Bil lion upgrade with their "Project Spring".
They are keen to build up a customer case quickly. That's why they are actu ally cheaper. For existing mobile customers their all-up price is only ? ?22 per month for fibre.
meanwhile they are pissing off a great many internet customers who are/were with Demon Internet. Having bought the company they have just announced the closure of that service.
My experience of Virgin Media has been pretty good right through from the days when it was NTL. Outages, unlike those on poor man's broadband, aka ADSL, have been extremely rare over the years and more to do with when NTL merged with Telewest (over a two or three month period afaicr) and then when NTL/Telewest bought the Virgin Media brand name (and a whole lot of problems with the ADSL network they'd inherited with that deal which compromised the reliability of their cable customers for at least a six month period before it all settled back down to their previous level of exemplary reliability).
On the very rare occasions when I've had to report loss of service, the response has also been exemplary so I can't complain about the service or its customer support staff. However, there have been times where Virgin Media have behaved like insurance company swine whenever they've embarked on a campaign to recruit more customers.
It's not the special 6 or 7 quid a month 6 month introductory offers for a service level being charged (at the time) at the normal rate of 22 quid a month to their existing loyal customers that annoys me so much as the fact that these Johnny come lately customers were being offered an immediate upgrade from the 10Mbps service, not to the promised doubling for free 20Mbps speed promised at some time during the next 12 months but an upgrade to 30Mbps for which they'd be charged the full 22 quid a month at the end of the introductory period, leaving their existing *loyal* customers to be treated like second rate garbage which really annoyed me.
I've no problem with VM making special introductory loss leader offers to build up their customer base but I think it's a total disgrace when they provide an immediate upgrade to a speed that's 50% faster again than what was vaguely promised to their existing customers already paying the full wack.
Sadly, it seems the insurance swine started a trend in maltreating existing loyal customers simply in order to entice new custom. It seems very few service companies these days attach any value to "Customer Loyalty". It's almost as if they *want* to generate 'Customer Churn' contrary to the tried and tested adage that "It's far easier to retain an existing customer than it is to recruit a new customer".
In VM's case, I suspect they're abusing their high quality of service's holding power to just short of its breaking point in order to maximise their return on their investment in such a highly reliable service and its support infrastructure.
ISTR a year or so back that VM had promised to upgrade the standard
30Mbps service to a 50Mbps service. I'm still patiently waiting but I have a feeling that VM rescinded this particular promise a while ago. Does anyone happen to know what the score is on this promised service upgrade?
They have a funny way of going about promoting their brand by setting out to totally annoy their existing customer base of Demon customers to the point where I will never do business with them again. It all started going to hell in a handbasket last year when they outsourced their web hosting without getting the settings right and on April 1st!
But for existing Demon ADSL customers their message is "get lost". Their latest stunt is to withdraw email services with 30 days notice.
There can't be many Demon customers actually with Voodofone any more.
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