Why Dont You Blog?

Reading an article on Thinkbroadband reminded me about the strange way that companies drop products that may be in the customers best interest and always claim it is down to “customer response.”

In the article, it seems that PlusNet is dropping one of its broadband “Your Way” packages. They are increasing the cap on the cheaper packages but removing the high end product that was capped at 40gb for £29.99 per month. Personally I hate usage caps and would never go with a provider that had a public on, but the fact is all providers (except maybe Virgin Cable) have some cap, they just dont always tell you.

Anyway, because people are using things like the BBC iPlayer so much (don’t ask me about this, I don’t use it) PlusNet felt they had to change the caps. Basically this is the route they went down:

Package Old Limit New Limit Cost
Option 1 1GB 1GB (no change) £9.99
Option 2 8GB 15GB £14.99
Option 3 20GB 30GB £19.99
Option 4 40GB (withdrawn) £29.99

Now at first glance, this looks like removing something that was the best deal for high end users but it isn’t quite that bad. It seems that you can get Option 3 and add 10gb at £0.75 per gb so it is a bit cheaper to do it that way - however this misses the point. Oddly, someone I can only assume works for PlusNet commented this on the Thinkbroadband site:

Not sure why you think BS is involved. 40GB withdrawn because very few customers chose BBYW4 and it now works out cheaper to buy Option 3 and add ten more GBs at 75p each. Just a case of simplifying the choices.

Erm. No. It does not “simply the choices” it actually makes it more complicated for the user. Now if people really weren’t going for the expensive choice, why remove it? Why did it cost PlusNet to leave a slight less cost effective option for users who wanted the “simplicity” of having a larger usage allowance. The only way option 4 is more expensive is when PlusNet don’t increase its limit, which they haven’t.

Equally strange, if this is a result of more people needing more bandwidth, why not increase the allowance of Option 4 in line with the others? As few people used Option 4 this extra bandwidth for those few customers (say 45gb) wouldn’t strain the system surely?

Now, don’t get me wrong. PlusNet can charge what ever they want for broadband. I am not even a customer. It is just that something about this repricing exercise struck the cynic in me as strange.

Sadly, it isn’t always the company that is the main driver. When Morgan Spurlock’s tedious “Super Size Me” hit the screens, McDonalds were quick to withdraw the “supersize” choice. Sadly for the customer this represented the most cost effective way of getting food and was close to a loss-maker for McDonalds. I am sure they were devastated to withdraw it. When supersize meals were available, a very low income family of four could feed all with two meals, now they would be hard pushed to do it with three and would probably need to buy four. For about 25% increase in cost, the supersized meal delivered 33%+ extra food (at least it did over here). The only thing not increased was the burger but they are big enough already. Now, because at the most fundamental level western people don’t like the thought of self control, we have lost the option.

Well done world.

Popularity: 25% [?]

Popularity: 25% [?]

Even though I had thought my problems with pipex were over, the BT engineer had come out and supposedly fixed the line, it seems I am still paying over the odds for a non-existent service.

I am aware ADSL is dependant on the number of subscribers at the local exchange but I also know that there are no new subscribers hanging off my exchange. From the chart you can see that in Jun and early July, the service was acceptable. In August it was non-existent (completely) and since it was restored it has been painfully slow.

Pipex is a terrible ISP. Pipex customer service is borderline incompetent. If you are looking for a new ISP, steer clear of Pipex.

Popularity: 29% [?]

Popularity: 29% [?]

Well, my opinion of Pipex was already very low. Before today I had them pegged as a terrible ISP with almost criminally poor customer service and basically inept technical support.

Today, they offended Forseti, and have managed to sink to a lower level on my opinion scale.

I wont fully repeat the tale of farce which has Pipex firmly in my “Bad Shop” category (in fact, I suspect they have more entries there than any other company), but in a nutshell after a month in which they were too inept to get BT out to fix my line (leaving me with no connection), they have still yet to get the service restored to the levels for which I am paying.

On Friday (four days ago), I spoke to technical support, who claimed to have carried out some tests and would now “escalate” the problem to BT. This is pretty much as far as I can push Pipex, as despite my only contract being with them, they do not have any form of service level agreement with BT - ineptitude, basically. Anyway, I was assured by the minimum wage arts student they have working as “technical support” that BT would respond to the fault within 1 - 6 days and get back to me.

Today, I had an SMS text message which informed me that Pipex Technical Support needed to carry out some more tests and could I ring them while I was sitting at the PC. This is a touch problematical, as I was at work miles from my PC, but never mind. Eventually I got home and had logged on by 1930 hrs to call Pipex as requested.

Now the farce got worse.

Every time I ring Pipex it annoys me. First off, it is an 0845 number so it costs money. Then the first thing they ask you is “if you are a residential customer, please enter your phone number now.” When you enter your phone number, you get presented with a list of options which runs “If you are a residential customer, press 1 now…” Why, in the name Kvasir do they ask you to enter your number first? Why?

When you finally get to press 2 for customer services, you are faced with an interminable wait, listening to some bored out of her head woman telling you “Thank you for holding the line. Your call is valuable to us.” Over and over. Why do companies think this is a good thing? What lunatic believes that the call is important or valuable, when you wait half the life of the universe for them to actually answer. And when they do, finally, answer it just gets worse!

After waiting a full 19 minutes (listening to how valuable my call is), the tech support arts student answered and went through the pointless list of “data protection act required verifications.” Finally, she asked me how she could help.

This left me a little confused, because she had just told me she’d called up my details and open tickets, so surely she should know I am calling in response to the text. Anyway, I explained I’d been asked to call and she went away. For four minutes. Eventually she came back and said that the “Technical Support” people (who was I speaking to?) had asked that I be contacted to confirm I wanted this escalating to BT. Slightly stunned, I said “yes” and she typed away and said, thanks - it will now be passed to BT. When I asked what had happened the last time they had promised it would be passed on to BT, she had no idea. She said it hadn’t been logged and didn’t know who had dealt with it. Now, I have the pleasure of another 1 - 6 day wait. Unless they text me half way through and ask if I want it to be sent to BT again…

This level of incompetence is mind boggling. I am at a loss to describe how frustrating, and how bad, Pipex customer service and technical support is. In August, I was given an identical run-around where over the course of a whole month they pretended to send the fault to BT, but never quite got round to it. It looks like this is going to happen again.

Showing that Loki really does have a monumental sense of humour, Pipex’s home page has a blurb which reads:

Sadly, this leaves me speechless. If it really is their “customers that matter,” why am I being singled out for this poor treatment. What have I done wrong, which makes Pipex pick me as the only person they are happy to mess around month after month?

If so many people like them “so much they’d recommend” them, why dont they bloody recommend them. I wouldn’t recommend them to Bin Laden…

Pipex are a terrible ISP. Their technical support is so bad it has become funny. Their service is abysmal (for instance, what happened to NNTP access?). In short, Pipex is bad. Do not use Pipex.

Popularity: 37% [?]

Popularity: 37% [?]

Long rant - if you are reading this on Planet Atheism / Planet Humanism (or just aren’t interested) and you don’t want to know about my troubles with a UK based ISP please skip this If you know anyone thinking of getting a new ISP, simply tell them to avoid Pipex at all costs.

My problems with Pipex continue unabated. I am in the process of trying to move away from them and get Sky Broadband but I am hitting hurdle after hurdle.

Following on from the fiasco where I had an entire month without internet connection, despite repeated false promises by the customer services staff and the only offer Pipex could make to placate me was to promise me an extra months connection for free - when this free month will be is anyone’s guess, I am still being billed each month - the connection still sucks. Pipex technical support have reached new levels of incompetence and it is getting to the point where I am tempted to simply cancel this phone line and get a new one…

Popularity: 53% [?]

Popularity: 53% [?]

Well, I am back online now after over a month without any method of connecting to the internet. I would like to say about how my ISP (Pipex) provided some wonderful technical support and helped me through the process, going the extra mile to earn the money I pay them each month.

In reality, the opposite is true. I will try to keep this brief as I am angry enough to rant for months over this, and I have every intention of bringing this up on a regular basis to make sure it remains “current” in search engines.

Basically put, Pipex is a “bad shop.” It provides a moderate service which is no longer really cost-effective in the ISP market of the UK. The headline promise is 8mb connection speeds but, so far, I have never got over 3mb. Once upon a time it had a good standard of technical support services, not any more. Pipex technical support and customer services are so bad it defies belief. It is one thing having a hard time helping a customer, it is another to lie and be rude to them. Pipex are terrible. Needless to say I am in the process of changing ISP now. On to the back story for this rant.

On 5 Aug, my internet connection died. No warning, no indication. At first I thought it was a fault or something with the server (the log kept reporting “LCP Down” and “Failed to synchronise”), so I tried to see if this was the case. Sadly, due to the time of day, the only way to see if there was a problem was to log on to Pipex’s website. Hard to do without an internet connection…

Popularity: 31% [?]

Popularity: 31% [?]

This is a short note to say I am back online now. Things are still a little hectic so “normal service” is not yet in place, however at least I can use things other than my phone to browse the web - it has shocked me how reliant “we” become on the internet for basic things.

Anyway, thanks to the miracle of Pipex, I have a working net connection (four days, only two of which were “working days,” after I ordered online) and things are certainly brighter now. Well Done Pipex.

Now I am “back” as it were, I will have a look at re-designing the site theme to try and improve on the issues it currently has and take on board the user comments you were kind enough to send. Thank you.

More soon.

Popularity: 35% [?]

Popularity: 35% [?]

How do you get broadband if you don’t have an Internet connection?

Answer: You phone someone with a net connection to do it for you.

Explanation: TW is currently offline due to having to move to a place in which only the most intrepid ISPs will offer the most minimal services. Thanks to the world-class silliness of Virgin media tech support service, I have also very recently spent another two weeks offline. I will spare you from the uber-dull details, solved eventually again by the Cafe-Nero-style lad who seems to be Virgin’s only competent techy. It was hellish, in a very mild sense of the word “hellish”, true, but, nonetheless, you wouldn’t choose to do it.

In fact, how does anyone live now without being plugged into the matrix of the Net?

Even given the willful Luddism that stops me from doing Internet banking or shopping, I genuinely can’t imagine how we lived before the Internet, let alone before PCs. It’s not that I wasn’t alive, then, either.

But, to be honest, I can barely conceive of there not being an Internet. If ever anything felt like historical inevitability, it’s the world wide web.

How did we get information? Despite dumping industrial quantities of used books on charity shops every time I move, this house is still a book depository. But, it never has a book with the right information when I need it.

Which is always ten minutes ago, because of the “instant information gratification” expectation that has come along with the Internet. So the library won’t do either.

In fact the local library, which was limited enough (with romantic novels, improving multicultural children’s books and fishing hobbyist books filling about 70% of its shelves) has been more or less replaced by a caffeine-beverages-free Internet cafe. The incommoding books got sold off for pennies, even adding a few volumes to the aforementioned book depository.

I seem to remember it was possible to write letters, take photos, contact people, do calculations, play games, draw pictures, play music and so on. It seems unlikely that we did them much, though, given how bloody hard it is to do any of these things without a computer and a net connection.

Pencil and paper are OK. At least they are portable. But, have you tried using a manual typewriter? A calculator? Well, you just wouldn’t, would you? You might as well get out the slate and abacus.

Have you tried even using your PC without the Internet, recently? It’s OK for playing music and doing 3d rendering. After that it’s like playing frisbee with a dog with its back legs cutoff.

Popularity: 21% [?]

Popularity: 21% [?]

This is a short post to let people know that Admin and myself will be off line now for a couple of weeks. Hopefully it wont be long before a functioning ISP / Net connection is re-established (will it be Sky? Will it be Pipex? Who knows but it bloody wont be Virgin Media!).

In the interim Heather will try to keep ranting about idiocy, bad science, bad philosophy and the like.

Bye bye for now…

Popularity: 20% [?]

Popularity: 20% [?]

Just a few “site admin” comments to make, so I thought I would make them all in one post.

First off, WordPress 2.2 has been released. Normally we would follow the generic Compuskills advice and wait a while before upgrading but, following some off-line playing, it seems this blog could upgrade sooner rather than later. For this upgrade we will have to delete all the existing files and upload new ones, so there could be a period where this site becomes unavailable or unusable. As, recently, we have been having a fairly continuous run of traffic (around 360 visitors per day) there seems no “low traffic” time to do this. All I can offer is an in advance apology if you get funny page layouts and the like.

Secondly - I will be getting rid of some plugins and experimenting with new ones. Your feedback is welcome, if one annoys you or breaks your feedreader or what ever, then please tell us. I think the “Sphere It” plugin will have to go, as it looks like it is slowing down the pages by a considerable amount now.

Lastly, as I am about to move house there will be a significant interruption of service. Hopefully Heather will be able to hold the fort, but given VirginMedia’s abysmal service there is no guarantee. Please, feel free to continue to comment or email us. They will be read eventually.

On a related note, if any one is a Sky Broadband customer I would love to know what the service you have had is like and how reliable it is - also is the service really uncapped? (Sky Max). I have my doubts over the veracity of Sky when the broadband thing gives three options - Base (£40 set up, no monthly charge, 2MB bandwidth, 2GB cap), Mid (£20 set up, £5 per month, 8MB Bandwidth, 40GB cap) and Max (no set up, £10 per month, 16MB bandwidth, no cap) - all of which seem amazing value for money.

Worryingly, when I put in the telephone number for my current address, I am told the only broadband option is Sky Connect (not one of the above) which is 8MB bandwidth with a 40GB cap (looks suspiciously like “Mid” above) but this will incur a £40 set up fee and £17 per month. Why on Earth does it cost over three times as much as “Mid?” Does this imply Sky have headline services and rates (which are very good) but in reality customers can not get them? (Would this even be legal?)

Still, I will for a while give Sky the benefit of the doubt and consider it as an option- unlike Virgin Media which I would, now, only consider if it was free and uncapped…

[tags]Site Admin, Why Dont You, WhyDontYou, WordPress, Blog, Blog Software, Admin, Web Design, Broadband, Cable, VirginMedia, RSS, Feeds, Plugins, Feedburner, XML, Technology, Virgin Cable, Virgin Media, Internet, ISP, Upgrade, Sphere, Sphere It, [/tags]

Popularity: 35% [?]

Popularity: 35% [?]

Just when I was starting to feel positive about Virgin.

(My net connection service is sorted. I was even beginning to feel a mite guilty - maybe the fault really was my raggedy cat5 - further damaged by the building work.)

An advert in the bus paper - the Metro - this morning compared the great cheap Virgin cable service - 10 MB broadband plus cable channels plus phone rental for £30- with the inferior Sky service.

The advert showed Sky with an impressive 80 MB or something- can’t remember the detail, sorry, but Virgin claimed it was capped and is slower the further you are from the hub (isn’t that true of all DSL anyway?) and costlier, at £36 plus £11 BT line rental.

Now, I was already a mite baffled, because surely it’s 10 Megabits not MB, which I am pretty sure usually means MegaBytes. Maybe it’s just how they put these things in ads, but as far as I can see, it’s exaggerating the speed by a factor of 8.

But I get home and open a letter from Virgin. It announces a 1 May price increase to £37 (though doubling the bandwidth, I am pleased to see) and an increase in phone charges. (Well, an exciting new way of calculating the phone charges, that sounds like a reduction - if you take some extra inclusive phone charge package - but slips in that they are rounding up to the nearest minute.)

So the price they are advertising today as being £6 a month lower than Sky’s package is actually going to be £1 more in a month. (And still minus Sky One.) Hmmm.

Popularity: 25% [?]

Popularity: 25% [?]