I am not happy...
Our favorite telco have has serious latency and congestion on around 2,000 lines all week. They have not been clear on what they are doing about it or what the problem is.
At one point they said it would be 3 weeks because a freeze on planned work over Christmas. Well, we get a tiny amount of compensation for faults going over 40 hours to fix, but when you talk of that many lines for that length of time you are talking tens of thousands of pounds. So we really should just report the faults. I have the scripts ready to roll sending in all the fault reports and rejecting them when they send back until they are fixed. What is interesting is that they see that many fault reports as costing them hundreds of thousands in terms of the effort of handling faults.
But, in the interests of working in partnership with our suppliers we have held off reporting that many faults. We want to work together and sort problems.
I really do not like fielding complaints from customers about the crap service, and spending all day on the phone to the supplier who are giving us the run around, and neither does Shaun.
Also interesting was comments on what the issue was, and comments about talking to shareholders for some reason. That seems strange (I am a shareholder!).
We think, and this is guesswork, that they have planned capacity for the WBMC shared link service that we buy (the equivalent of the old Central product) and they have hit limits on some links. That they have to buy* more capacity and they don't want to. But that they are scared to say that's the service, tough as it would be an admission that 21st Century Network is actually not as good as the old products (which did not have this problem) and also that it is not as good as competing back-haul providers. We have a choice!
The latest is, having agreed they would fix things tonight, they then send a notice saying they anticipate the issue will be fixed 13th Jan. WTF!!! back on to account manager in the evening at home.
We have many customers moving lines to another back-haul provider. In fact, the new ordering page on our web site makes that totally automated. The other supplier are actually expecting to match config so it will be possible with no change of any router settings soon.
So, if you are pissed off - we offer a choice. If you want to know more - ask sales.
Still, I reckon we are the most tenatious ISP in dealings with this supplier and pushing them to provide a proper service.
* We are talking of a company that has corporate schizophrenia and buys from itself which is not something that actually costs its shareholders!
Update: Get this - the incident desk do not have access to update the incident details on an report to fix the date of the 13th Jan!
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WTF?
ReplyDelete"Earlier an Incident was declared where we informed you that some of your Broadband End Users will have experienced a loss or slow throughput of Broadband Service. After further investigation there is no incident to report."
They are trying to cover it up now?
The problem is that if you don't report all n-thousand faults, they'll stretch it out because there's no liability.
ReplyDeleteOf course, if you do report the faults, they'll calculate that they owe you m-thousand pounds, write it off and then not bother to do anything about it until the new year anyway.
At least the second way you get some money out of it.
Personally I wouldn't have been as accommodating as you have been (and it's not often I'd say that :-) - the telco provide a mechanism for reporting faults and so that is exactly what I would do.
It would be interesting to do an analysis of the responses to each of the n-thousand fault reports.
One of the dangers is, as we have seen from experience, that they do random things when you report faults and some of those are bad.
ReplyDeletee.g. changing margin, sending engineers, and even disconnecting lines so they can be re-jumpered a few days later.
The responses are far from sensible or consistent.
Would you have any come-back if you marked the fault reports as: "DO NOT change margin, send an engineer or arrange for the line to be re-jumpered. Placing such an order will reveal your incompetence to the world"?
ReplyDelete:-)
Like that works. We have done that in capitals and all sorts and they totally ignore what we say.
ReplyDeleteThey've got 1000 SFI engineers waiting ready to go the moment you report the faults...
ReplyDelete