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Local Broadband
Here, as requested, is a poll about broadband.
1. Who do you use?
2. What speed do you get?
Comments
Talk Talk
AOL
Tiscali
Pipex
Bulldog
and Andy at Freedom2Surf
Hey. Stop throwing stuff!
BTW - General opinion is that O2 (who own Be) offer an excellent ADSL service if you don't have Cable.
I take it that buying up Tiscali put Talk Talk top of that list.
We were with TT for three years. For much of that time, they purposely limited our connection to 0.5Mb, yet denied it until a tech support guy finally admitted it and fixed it. Their hosting didn't work. We spent many hours on the phone with tech support trying to sort it out. Not a single one of them knew what they were talking about, or knew what a Mac was. When we finally got around to canceling the account, it took three phone calls and six weeks for them to do it. Oh, and then they charged us for an extra month of service. After hours on the phone with customer service, we still haven't got the promised refund.
I hope TalkTalk burns in hell. Or at least goes bankrupt. (No offense to Glyn. It probably wasn't your personal fault.)
Case in point, the broadband outage this past weekend: I notice my service was out on Thursday evening. I called and the automated message said there was a problem in N4. No big deal and I figured it could take a day to sort out. When it wasn’t back by Friday evening I called again and hung on for a live person to simply ask when they expected it to be working again.
The rep wouldn’t budge from the script and after 15 minutes wasted he acknowledged the problem wasn’t my computer or modem but their servers were down. All I wanted to know was a rough estimate as to when the service would be back. I was annoyed at this point but not volcanic. But when the rep suggested that he had no idea when it would be fixed but it’s all OK and not a big deal -- I erupted.
A couple of months ago on a Friday I got a call from Virgin telling me that my monthly DD bill - which hadn't then been presented to my bank - was approaching £200. My wife had been working from home a lot due to office relocation and had been making lots of transatlantic calls. We weren't worried about the bill as it's all expense-able to her work.
Anyway, Virgin informed me that with immediate effect they were putting a freeze on my account and that I wouldn't be able to make any more telephone calls until the 'debt' as they called it had been settled. I was furious. I have never not paid a bill and I asked them how could it be a debt when I had not yet been asked to pay. I reminded them of my payment record and queried whether I was a good customer; big bills and reliable payer! The people on the other end of the phone were obviously reading from a script.
After spending far too long on the phone I left if for the weekend. Come the following Monday I could see that £200+ had left my bank account. Could I make telephone calls? Of course not. Cue more calls to Virgin. I left messages. The promised calls were not returned. I must have spoken to a dozen people over the next two or three days by the time I asked to be put through to the disconnections team. Who were most apologetic.
In return for not leaving they offered me a 90% discount on all international calls, waived the fee for the international call package and gave me a £15 / month discount on my existing bundle.
Virgin are now about £100 worse off each month. Idiots.
Most companies are realising that half-decent service is the way to keep customers, but for the last few years its been such a land-grab for new members that its been forgotten about - this also leads to some companies coming up with staggering (and unprofitable) deals which will eventually come around to bite them.
Now that the industry has consolidated down to 3 big players (plus Sky) it will be interesting to see who can best hold onto their customers and frankly, who has the money to do this...
Yeah, the "what do you use 20MB for?" question is easily answered by "*cough*torrents*cough*"
Everyone dies at the end of 30 Rock season 3!
Is there any other industry that provides such consistently crap service and gets away with it? Maybe budget airlines.
I spent three months reading ISP reviews before switching to Virgin. I phoned them to double check that we could and would be getting 10Mb. Of course, the salesman assured me that it wouldn't be a problem. As soon as the cable was installed, we found out that actually, this area would be limited to 4Mb until the end of last year. We were getting around 2Mb. We called, we complained. No one took responsibility.
They act like it's a minor inconvenience to have no internet service for two days. Unaesthetic and I both work from home. No internet = no work = no pay = no supper. I have a laptop, so I can go to a cafe. Unaesthetic works on a desktop. He can hardly drag a PowerMac down to Ariana's.
I don't need a £10-credit as a goodwill gesture. That hardly makes up for a day of not being able to work.
see
http://www.ofcom.org.uk/telecoms/ioi/copbb/copbb/
This is the code of practice which was put in place to try and address the issues you have.
If Virgin are not being consistent in providing the service promised they probably should compensate you and spin you down to a lower package cost until they provide it correctly.
Another point is that if you running a “business” from home using BB you can get “Business “ strength products with better services levels but you have to pay more for that.
see
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8073068.stm
We're not running a business. I'm registered as self-employed, but not as a company. I don't think I need a business package to check my e-mail and google things.
The whole compensation thing is a joke. It's a token gesture that's supposed to make you feel better about getting screwed over yet again. £10 is not going to make up for me missing a deadline and losing a client. Is Virgin going to pay my rent for the next three months?
This reminds me of the time I was stranded in the Pittsburgh airport with $300-worth of theatre tickets in my bag. I was supposed to meet my parents in Toronto to see some show that night. My flight was canceled. The next one was full. The airline gave me a $6 food voucher to make up for it. Not that you can buy anything for $6 in an airport.
I guess the Product Marketing people at Virgin have kind of got you “bundled”.
They seem to have succeeded in getting you to put up with poor BB as you perceive you have more to loose by leaving. Bundling is a great tool to reduce churn. I wonder what your breaking point is?