Sky Digital Broadband Problems
Another part of living in the country is the appalling broadband service.
I think I’ve spent in total around 12 hours plus on the phone getting in touch with Sky, I’ve spent hours listening to on-hold music, spent days in waiting for BT engineers for them never to turn up. I’ve plugged laptops into the main router, switched off everything and run tests while sat on my haunches in a freezing hall, I’ve even upon Sky request ran tests after midnight and submitted the results remotely knowing that they’ll expire and disappear if I didn’t get in touch by a certain date. Then letting the date lapse due to not having the patience or time to wait on hold for an operator, even though I knew my satisfaction is important to them.
All in all I gave up a couple of weeks ago, I knew that I’d be fobbed off again with a new excuse or a new test to perform, sing loudly while standing on one foot at midnight etc. etc.
I actually am very reasonable, I have not once lost my temper with an engineer, in fact I’ve got into a bit of a routine where I put on a headset, a headset I exclusively got for Sky support calls, and get on with some work while having a quick game of Solitaire once in a while. I really do like the Sky guys too and always tend to have a good chat with them while they try to resolve the issue, I think I’ve only ever had one particularly bad experience but generally they’re just doing their jobs and they’re a pretty nice set of chaps.
Anyway like I said I gave up, I thought it was all too much to bear and I knew that it wasn’t resolving anything. A new router, an engineer who said one thing, a line fault, no line fault, .5Mb/sec is not against our SLA etc. Anyway I found it wasn’t totally terrible and I needed more time to do other things and as I was informed on a regular basis, there would be proper fibre in my area by the end of the year.
Tonight though it got a bit too much, this had happened a couple of time before and the service was/is terrible. I picked up my email and it took around 20 minutes to download 10Mb of email. Not good at all so I decided to give up giving up.
Headset on and I phoned the Sky broadband direct line, hey I have the perks y’know, sorted out some banking and ran a couple of games of Klondike (if I win this time then they’ll answer the phone, you’ll know what I mean by that if you play a lot of Solitaire, or the decision making card tool as I know it). Anyway some time on hold and I get a very nice man called Barry to whom I thought I’d spoken to before – turns out I was mistaken so not a great start. Anyway he looks into my account and quite disbelievingly he tells me that for some reason my broadband had been cancelled over a fortnight ago – I think he mentioned the 20th of January. Anyway that was a new one. Turns out I had no explanation for this and neither did he, I’d not even threatened to leave despite the service and not a dicky bird had been mentioned of cancelling so this was quite the mystery.
Anyway a catch 22 situation ensued, he could detect a line fault but couldn’t register the fault as I effectively didn’t have a broadband service. All good fun. Anyway after around another 20 minutes, being conservative here, he dropped the line, did a full test and phoned back to confirm the fault. I now have yet another BT engineer visiting this Friday to try and sort out the problem. I reckon it could be an ancient junction box in the kitchen or it could simply be that someone upstairs doesn’t like me having a good broadband service – what someone’s living in my attic J
Anyway we finished our call and Barry asked if there was anything else he could do to help, I said yes I thought that I needed a discount on my account, Barry agreed and said he’d see what he could sort, nice man. See that’s where one gets for being nice, nothing fixed and the promise of a discount.
Anyway I reckon I could have found the problem, lurking in the kitchen is what resembles a BT connector box that looks as though it was installed circa 1960. I reckon what with this period antique and the little spider twanging the wires then we could have found the source of the problems.