The Battle For Broadband (2)

08-02-2012

It's 2012 and apparently getting broadband installed to your home is among one of the most difficult things to get done in Ireland today.

Sometimes this baffles me. What basically boils down to flipping a switch or plugging in a cable is made out to be an epic trek across the Himalayas without a guide in the middle of a blizzard in order to sacrifice your first born. True you need to have a line installed to the house, but as most houses these days are built with at least a phoneline already installed it does not explain why getting broadband is so complex.

For a country that keeps on touting Budget after Budget that we will become a 'skilled IT country' they really need to fix such a gaping level of stupidity as month long broadband installations.

See I wanted this first entry on The Bauble, post house move, to be about the new house. I never got the chance to upload the fixed gallery code before the move (as we were moving most nights) and figured it would be nice to have the first post in the new house contain some pictures of it and talk of the house itself. Sadly this is not the case.

Knowing that the mystery of broadband installation is obviously a dark art in this country I decided to be pro-active. I ordered it for the new house a solid month before we moved out of the apartment. I booked a day off work to wait in the new house to have the installation guy come out and do his thing.

A week and a half later and still no Internet. Meaning no code upload, no pictures uploaded to The Bauble (they are on Facebook though if you are friends with me there) and nothing but frustration from the Customer Support.

Which is surprising.

See in an odd quirk of business purchases the company that hosts The Bauble bought the company that provided broadband to the apartment a few years ago. Without any conscious effort on my part I was using the same company for two completely different things and everything went swimmingly.

Ordering the broadband from them had been easy the first time. Router came in the post, line was turned out, painless and simple. Cancelling the same line was just as easy. Midnight of the 27th saw the apartment loose Internet connectivity, five hours after we had left it for good.

I like simple like that. Makes life easy.

Yet now I seem to be in a strange limbo with the company. I rang up the day the "technician" didn't show up and was told I would get an call the next day. This never happened. I then emailed their customer support, had another girl call me back and assure me that I would get a call the next day.

That was last week.

Yesterday I mailed them again, as their customer support line just throws you into the general pool of "support" and you never get the same person twice, telling them that updates on the order were needed or cancellations would be happening.

I think my tolerance for this sort of thing is not helped by the fact that I work in IT. I am not the average Joe who can be fobbed off with silly talk about badger sets causing outages on a blue moon. If I get told it takes over a month to do a simple task it rings big bullshit bells in my head. As loath as I am to go with Eircom for Internet I think I may have to, shudder, consider them as an option.

Hopefully the next time I post it will be from the house and can be about the move and not the ongoing battle for broadband.

Blue_jester