Categories: uncategorized
Date: 22 November 2006 12:33:36
For a given value of fun, namely Not Fun At All. My ISP and BT have been playing with the exchanges for the last couple of days, doing something called Local Loop Unbundling, which apparently has all sorts of whizzy benefits:
o Enhanced Service Resiliency
o Future speed capability of up to 24Mb
o Greater flexibility in the range of services on offer
Quoting from the e-mail they sent me, I may experience a brief outage when the work reaches my exchange, and I may be unable to access broadband immediately after the work has been completed. Should this occur, please power down modem & leave for 30 minutes.
Call me old-fashioned, but having no broadband access for two days (and counting, this will be the third), doesn't equal "a brief outage" in my book.
Phoned their helpline when I got home last night. "our office hours are 8am to 6pm, please call back during those times." Click. Brrrrr.
Ah. Unfortunately, due to Metronet's spectacular and on-going breakage of the Central Line (ten minutes between trains on a service that is timetabled to run every 90 seconds during the morning and evening peak is not minor delays, you rotten, thieving, lying incompetents, I hope you get fined considerably more than £1,000,000), I didn't get home until 7.15pm last night.
Phoned them up from work today, on an 0870 number, naturally. There is a special corner of Hell reserved for any company that considers "Love Changes Everything" played on the pan pipes to be suitable hold music. Especially when you have so few staff, or so many customers with horrendous problems, that it takes you an hour to answer a call that's on hold. An hour of being forced to listen to various middle-brow tunes being butchered on the pan pipes has got to be worth a good few years off Purgatory, surely?
Anyway, when BT did their thing at the exchange, they did it very badly indeed, and apparently half of Rosamundiville has been phoning up their ISP and going "I've got no broadband!" Knowing Rosamundiville, this probably includes people who are still on dial-up.
It will, allegedly, be fixed by the time I get home tonight, which, given Metronet's sterling performance for the last three days, will probably be midnight.
The wireless broadband kit is, needless to say, still in the box.