New customer experience - fail

[figgehedberg]

Hi everyone,

I was hoping I wouldn’t have to post here but here it goes anyway....

After a few years using a third party mobile broadband ISP, with name I shall not name, we finally had enough of crappy reception and ridiculous data speeds (averaging 0.01Mb/s) causing even Google to time out, and took the step over to Telstra Bigpond and ADSL 2+. As I run a bussiness from home and my wife and son needs access for various Uni and school work, we need a both faster and more reliable internet connection.

I was hoping it wouldn’t cause as much hassle as our previous provider....

The story starts with us having to connect our phone, as we have not used any home phone as yet. The lines are there and the previous owner used the phones. I visited our local Telstra shop and signed up for the cheapest phone plan just to cover our line rental, I was told this was going to take about 3 working days. We got the line connected about in reasonable time and had to call in to a 1800 number to confirm the connection was working. At the same time I ordered the ADSL.

3 days later I get a phone call, and expecting confirmation that the internet is now connected, but no. The service representative was informing me that the phone has now been connected..... hang on..??!! Didn’t I just do this a few days ago...when I ordered the internet..? Apparently the representative I spoke to was not in his right to allow me to order the ADSL service as the phone line connection first had to be fully processed on their end before signing up to any other service.

A new order was placed and the whole proceed took about a week to get sorted. A small hiccup on the way but all in all not too bad after handling with my previous ISP.

The ADSL was as of Monday (20.08.2012) connected as agreed on. Finally..!!! Speeds and connection was great...we were once again back in the 21st century.

[I wish the story end here]

But then last night our connection dropped out, this is after 2 1/2 days...!!! I immediately contact the customer service and notified about my dropped connection. After restarting the modem and the support representative at the other end ran a few diagnostics she escalates the problem to a technician. The technician was to look at the exchange first thing this morning and get back to me if he/she needs access to our house to investigate further.

After not hearing anything until lunch time I contact the number provided and hand over my reference number as provided the previous evening.

The representative says the matter has been escalated to a level 2 technician and gives me a second number to contact the right department for further enquiry.

After calling the second number, I then get told by the representative at the other end that she first needs to run a few diagnostics/tests before she can assign a technician to have a look at the exchange. Since I am, like soooo many other of us, actually working during daytime I now have to wait for the representative to call me back tonight and run the test....

What the heck happened to the tech that was supposed to come out this morning...? Was the service representative I talked to last night telling me lies...or was she like the previous representative not entitled to make this commitment..?

Is there any communication between these departments at all....is seems as though it’s a bit like they are just trying to move you around to a different department just to get you off their own hands. Nobody seems to be committed to actually solving the problem. We are in great need to get the internet connected as we have already a long backlog of items that needs to be done over the internet.

I'm not having a very good feeling about this at all. It's like our previous ISP all over again...

Would be shame to see yet again another ISP fail in the most basic part of our contract.

/Fred

[jokiin]

the challenge with your situation is that you've hooked up a phone line to get your ADSL running, as you would need to of course, but as you haven't had the phone hooked up previously it's hard to judge what condition the line is in, a lot of phone lines aren't in great shape and if your line has been inactive for some time it often adds to the problem, connected customers get access to the best copper available, if that happens to have been the wire that at some stage ran to your place then a tech could have swapped some lines over, very common occurrence, whenever you get an old inactive line hooked up there can be teething problems, once they get it sorted though you should find the service quite stable and reliable

you would have gone through this process no matter which provider you got your ADSL through also, regardless of which, the last mile (exchange to your house) is always the problem area

[figgehedberg]

I'm just a bit worked up by the run around and lack of progress that I'm all too familiar with from previous ISP.

[jokiin]

been there, done that, went through similar when moving house and getting everything setup, it all worked out in the end but was frustrating at the time, I use a 3G service for backup so not without when things go wrong (my Telstra 3G services smokes my ADSL service as well) so it's bearable but still an annoyance