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Today we were booked in, without any consultation with us as to day or time, to have someone from Telstra show up some time between 8am and 1pm to do an install for an iinet connection. We'd received an email saying that if we didn't currently have a working Telstra line in the house the technician may need to have access to the house to complete the install and that if there was no-one here to let them in it would cost us $109 to reschedule. Now we've been here for 7 years and we've been on Optus cable all that time so we don't actually know whether the Telstra line that runs to the house is connected to anything useful or not so it seemed like a good idea for one of us to be here. But I had craft group at 9am and canteen duty at 11am so Adam rang iinet to say we'd need to change the time. And was told it would cost us $109 to reschedule and that we would still not get to choose the day or time for the new appointment.
What?!
Let me get this straight. Telstra wholesale sets the time for the technician to come out without consulting us. We can't change that time without forking out $109. If we can't be here and the tech needs access to the house it will cost us $109. Either way if there's a reschedule we still don't get to work out a mutually suitable time. Repeat until...what? Either we get lucky and the tech doesn't need access (apparently the most likely scenario) or...not. What the hell happens for customers for whom the tech does need access and who work inflexible jobs that don't allow them to shift things around and be home at the arbitrary time set by Telstra wholesale? I wonder if any poor sods have had to go through multiple iterations of missing the tech and having to fork out $109 for reschedules. I get the feeling Telstra wants to make it as difficult as possible for people to hook up with iinet, anti-competitive behaviour anyone?
I stayed home from craft group but I had to go to canteen, the tech hadn't been when I left and there was no evidence to indicate whether they'd been when I got home, I guess that's a good sign.
A Year in Sunsets
10 hours ago
5 comments:
Good News Week this week (paraphrased) "You can now download Bin Laden's video messages to your phone... so now you can have an organisation even more evil than Telstra on your mobile".
Don't get me started. I know of people that have got stuck in the "we can't fix it, therefore it isn't our fault" loop. And given the mind boggling incompetence of the Bigpond help desk, it doesn't take much to get there. Damn, you did get me started. I'll stop now shall I?
Aah, Telstra. They really do take the cake don't they? Here is another Telstra shocker.
http://telstrawoes.blogspot.com/
I too am in the category of "Don't get me started"...
I signed us up to iiNet for the new place and last Friday a Telstra person was supposed to be doing the ol' switcheroo thingy for us between 8am and 1pm. However I get a message at 2pm from iiNet saying that Telstra had rescheduled it for 3rd March because they were overbooked.
So that means taking a second day off work to sit around and wait just in case...I'm so unimpressed.
And yet our experience of moving WITH Telstra was wonderful. There WERE problems with the line when we arrived, and the technicians came out twice in two days to get it fixed. And our ADSL was up and working on the day we arrived here. Being an existing customer was a big advantage for us, in terms of continuity of connection.
I wonder what's going to happen once we change over to iiNet or some other ISP? (we want ADSL2, and we're still waiting for it to be enabled here)
-rant-I think the problem here is the Telstra Wholesale guys anti competitive behavior, the guys being so difficult are the Telstra techs. They are being difficult because of the Telstra procedures to make their competitors lives difficult. Telstra really dont want people using ADSL 2+ because it undermines the more expensive products telstra are trying to get a premium on.
This obstructionism from Telstra of course is having the exact opposite effect on me.
/-rant-
ps. I had to use the "-" rather then the "<" because blogger thought i was entering a HTML tag...
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