DSF

Broadband providers are a law unto themselves. It would just be nice to actually get what you buy instead of the inferior connection and service.

Karen. wrote:I have not been on in the last week due to an absolutely crap company that calls itself a broadband provider leaving us with no internet for the last week. It is still not sorted and will be be another 7 working days yet apparently, so I have been out this morning and bought a mobile broadband dongle instead to get us back online.

I had the same issue last year and my solution was the same - I got a PAYG 3G dongle from O2. As my luck would have it, I then found the '3' offer for a free PAYG 3G dongle. So now I have two choices. (Actually, I have three because I can connect my laptop to my mobile phone.)

We have a network here and recently upgraded our router to one that will accept a 3G dongle. Now, if our broadband provider goes down, I just have to pop in the dongle, top it up, and everyone can use the same mobile connection (and that includes things that you couldn't normally plug a mobile dongle into - like my iPod Touch). If mobile broadband was just a little cheaper for more data transfer, I'd tell our regular broadband provider where to go.

Oh, and just to fuel my paranoid "the world's going to end" glass-half-empty view, I also have a USB dial-up modem. Can't have enough backups!

Paul wrote:I had it before... With BT. no my fault. something in the box down the road. but guess what?? they still charged me for whole month!

The worst thing about broadband going wrong is when you phone up and get some clueless idiot on the other end who can do nothing but ask daft questions like "is it plugged in"? The last one was classic in which she kept going on and on about modem drivers. This was for a computer plugged into a STB. There is no "modem driver" when using the STB simply because there is no modem. She couldn't understand that simple concept and kept insisting that I "reinstall the modem driver". Going round in circles just drove me nuts. I eventually insisted on speaking to someone else which she agreed to but then hung up!

A little while later we tried again, went through the whole thing again (although, this time, there was no clueless orang-utan going on about modem drivers) and they said they'd have to send an engineer out to fix the box. Reluctantly I agreed. A couple of days later we got a message on the answerphone from some engineer saying they'd sorted it out and it should be working now (it was).

This kind of thing happens every time. They insist on blaming the customer but, the truth is that 99% of the time it's their equipment - not ours - that's gone wrong. Why don't they learn? It's a rough do when the customer knows more about their product than the so-called "technical support" line.