Monday 26 July 2004

Pic of the day: The no-broadband blues. (Screenshot from The Sims.) They may suffer in silence, but I won't! Hear me WHINE!

Disconnected weekend

This is not obvious from yesterday's entry, but in fact I was without Internet connection from around 2AM on the night to Sunday until after work on Monday. That's not the worst of it, though. The worst of it is the customer service of Telenor, my DSL provider. (Not that I am convinced the competition would be any better. But who knows.)

I know that sometimes problems arise, and on weekend nights the engineers are probably drunk, like most Norwegians are at such a time. So I did not make any fuss about it, and waited until Sunday morning. Sunday morning came, no connection. There was no change in my equipment, I only got a message that the other machine was not responding. So I waited a bit more, then logged on with a modem and a competitor's dial-up service. I checked Telenor's home pages, found the latest drift messages. "No known problems."

So I logged on their help chat, and explained the symptoms. The helpful guy there had no clue either. I turned off the machine and the DSL "modem" and turned them back on. I tried another PC, I tried another "modem" (I just happen to have a spare) (Telenor sent me two, one when I should have gotten the DSL and once again some weeks later when I actually got the DSL). I changed cables. I did more than was humanly possible to do to try to solve the problem at my end, despite the machine saying that it was the other machine that did not respond. But if that was the case, surely there would have been a notice at their web site? I had even checked the local area messages. All fine. Or at least, surely their help desk would be informed if there were technical difficulties?

Eventually the guy asked me to log it using the business customer interface. I got the secret web page address and filed a pretty exact problem description. Some minutes later, a competent sounding man called. He explained that this was a known problem affecting a number of people, and would be fixed by Monday afternoon. This also came to pass.

But why didn't they admit it before? Do they think their technical logs are a kind of advertising tool to display their imaginary perfectness, or do they not care that they create problems for their existing paying customers? They may never have heard of word-of-mouth. Well, if they ever read this, they will see how it works. Not to mention that I do get questions pretty frequently from people making purchase decisions. In which case I will have to say, "I don't know about the others but Telenor is a lying hypocrite of a DSL provider. I know this from experience."