I feel your pain. I’ve been having similar problems with my cable internet (Virgin Media - formerly NTL) at home - intermittent disconnection and loss of service - sometimes for hours at a time, on average, only about 60% uptime and often down for many hours, even days at a time. I’ve had to go through numerous cycles of calling tech support, waiting on hold for half an hour, to finally speak with some exported call centre, where it seemed to be the first time I’d ever described the problem to them - so I’d have to go through all the basic diagnostic steps again (‘could you try turning off the modem, waiting 30 seconds, then turning it back on again?’), every time, even though I had given them my account reference details and mentioned the previous calls.
It also took upwards of 10 days lead time on an engineer visit, which would have to take place during the working day, so I’d have to take a whole afternoon off and when the engineer arrived, the connection would invariably happen to be working just fine, so he’d twiddle with the wire, declare that it all seems OK now, close the case and leave. Twenty minutes after the engineer would leave, the thing would start going wrong again, but it was impossible to call him back, I had to go through the whole tech support process again and describe it all over from scratch.
After six weeks of this, and being told that the earliest engineer visit available was 20 days hence, I just asked them to close the account - they had to transfer me to someone else in Customer Care, with 20 minutes additional on-hold time.
The sickest thing about all of it is that the account termination process takes 30 days - taking me into another billing period - I protested that it was completely unfair to bill me any more for a service that I was terminating because it just doesn’t work. The response was that they couldn’t do anything about that and that if I wanted a credit, I’d have to talk to tech support.
So I called Tech support (another half hour on hold), who said they couldn’t credit my account, that would be Customer Care! At this point, I started shouting - it was Customer Care who sent me here! The tech support operative said he’d transfer me directly to the right department and put me through to a young lady who was very civil, but couldn’t help me because she only dealt with telephone accounts, and mine was a cable internet account, so she said she’d transfer me to the right place, but she transferred me to a line that just gave me a busy signal.
So I tried contacting them by email - there was no contact address anywhere on their site - only a web form, so I filled this in, but the promised response within seven days never showed up.
I’ve cancelled my direct debit. Fuck 'em - they’ll try to bill me and it won’t work, whereupon they’ll write me a shitty letter demanding the money. By my reckoning, they owe me money - they’re supposed to credit my account if I experience loss of connection for more than 24 hours - and one time, it was out for a whole week, plus I probably ought to tot up all the money I’ve spent on telephone calls to their call centre.
The only reason It’s taken me this long to give up and switch to a different company is that I’ve also got to switch technologies - moving from cable to DSL, meaning I have to buy new hardware. I should have cut my losses and done this much sooner.
