To whom it may concern, I am writing to you now out of immense of frustration with your company, and on the verge of seeking an alternative provider. Almost 4 weeks ago on Friday April 29 I noticed our internet slow to below dial-up speed. The connection was unusable for even the simplest of tasks such as browsing or checking email.
An initial phone call was placed to your customer service helpline with the resulting correspondence; I was informed firstly that if a technician were to be called out and the fault was with ‘our’ modem (which we pay a monthly hire fee for from your company), then we would incur an approximate $100 fee for the call out. This strikes me as poor service for a number of reasons, the most obvious being of course that it is your company that rents us the unit, but second and most importantly, because I was informed by your customer service representative that even if I had wanted a technician to come and inspect or repair the unit, that Orcon were completely unable to give us a time frame in which I could expect that to happen. An apparent indefinite time frame in which we are expected to go without service, or even any information whatsoever.
Absolutely no time frame in which a technician could come to assess or repair a service?
In my entire life I have never encountered such a lack of support for a service of any kind. If it were telephone, power, gas or any other service it would be fixed within 24hrs. Granted there would probably be a cost attached, but the simple necessity of a service provider giving support for its service seems, to me at least, to be one the most basic tenets of operating a business. Anyhow, at that time I was instructed to download and run a diagnostics package, which I did. Since I was given no instructions on how to follow up on the diagnostic activity, I awaited a phone call from your technical support which I did not receive. The next day, after receiving no word from Orcon I decided it would be prudent to purchase another ADSL modem, because at approximately $100 I'm no worse off than if we'd had a technician come to fix the modem that we (again) rent off you... It turns out that this didn't fix the problem, and here began the additional financial cost of the ongoing and unfixed fault, as well as the stupendous inconvenience of having 3rd world internet access (even by pathetic New Zealand standards).
After several days of failed phone calls to your helpdesk attempting to glean information about our problem, I was instructed to run the diagnostic tool again, and after once again receiving no feedback, assistance, or the slightest hint of an approximate time that a technician might think about coming to repair our near non-existent 'service', I decided to call the help desk again. As a result I found out that our diagnostic procedure had not been even registered, despite being completed successfully at my end. Thankfully owing to that particular phone call it was then logged in the system.
We did, however, have slightly better feedback from the team of guys running your twitter account over the following weeks. After a couple of truths were mentioned about your abhorrent lack of service on my twitter account, we received a sympathetic gesture and promises of 'follow ups' that have amounted to little more than zero. Whilst I appreciate the sincerity of the gestures displayed by the individuals, it's little more than PR management and if we can't resolve the issue I will continue to do my utmost to recommend to others that they stay away from your (non-existent) service.
As a consequence of the public airing, I believe our 'profile' has been changed twice now, each with extremely minor improvements to perhaps make our internet function at an almost usable level. I am not sure how many more 'profiles' you have that you can try to put us on, but it seems to me that this is nothing more than a delay tactic and that your company has continued, by and large, to show no genuine interest in fixing our problem.
Now after almost 4 weeks, I have received only one piece of communication that was initiated by your company. Instead, usually, I am forced to endure excruciatingly long wait times on customer service help desk numbers only to be told the same stuff every day; that Orcon don't know what the problem is (and are now seemingly unwilling to fix it??), or care about customers enough to think that scheduling a serviceman or technician might be an appropriate response to a major fault. Sometimes if we're especially "lucky" we can get an answer phone message telling us that nobody is able to take our call, but someone will 'call us back', presumably once the backlog of dissatisfied customers clears from the lines.
Aside from the general inconvenience of being unable to access banking websites, check email, messageboards, Facebook or other networking sites, blogs, picture storage, data backup, news websites, web based apps like tweetdeck or RSS readers, or a myriad of other day to day browsing requirements, we are currently unable to access paid and/or free packages that rely on internet access such as NHL hockey & NBA basketball video subscriptions and access to gaming subscriptions that are unable to be played offline. Currently we estimate the sunk cost of those services to be approximately USD$100 and counting – and this is without stating the actual disappointment of paying for these services and having them made inaccessible without information from our internet service provider as to when we might even be able to watch them.
Currently our browsing speed can only be described as ‘erratic’, and even at its best is painfully slow and difficult to manage. Slow loading of gmail, yahoo or facebook (at times the loading is so slow that we can’t even log in to banking sites to perform the most basic tasks), streaming videos is (and has been the entire time) slower than dial up speed – to buffer a 5min youtube or ESPN video takes over an hour, and that is at lowest available quality. Probably most importantly, one of our flatmates also works from as a web programmer, and since this fault has been unable to work effectively from home. Leading up to that time he had been completing up to 25hrs a week, over and above his regular working hours. The cost of this is difficult to estimate in terms of project delays on top of missed hours of work, but none the less he is out of pocket significantly because of this delay. Up until this fault we had found Orcon’s naked plans to be the only ones to service our needs. Getting away from a fixed landline to reduce unnecessary costs, and also having the necessarily high data cap limit that we require for our many services. It is a sad reality that we are going to have to seek an alternative provider because previously there has been no other provider that even comes close to fulfilling what we see as our monthly requirements – a sad indictment of New Zealand ISPs as a whole. That said, we are unable to continue on with this current arrangement, especially not at such a great cost, in both sunk expenses and lost earnings.
Unless we are unable to establish a repair protocol and time frame for our line within the next 48hrs, we will be terminating our relationship with Orcon and signing with another ISP. Given our complete lack of information or timing about our fault I believe this to be the only fair course of action. If this is the case we will be seeking compensation from Orcon for the loss of services and income incurred up until this point.
Over the course of the last 3 weeks I have had discussions with friends who have had similar problems with your services and queried them about how their situations were resolved in attempt to find some insight to our own problems in the absence of information from Orcon. One possible solution was someone realised that it was the cabinetisation in their neighbourhood that had slowed their line down, and was asked to be put onto the Telecom wholesale network as an outright solution to the problem. I would at appreciate this option being investigated to solve our issue. At very least we require a technician to come and review our situation with a look to immediate repair – I would think that given we pay for the most expensive consumer plan available and the absurd length of time we have been left almost without service or genuine information this should be a priority.
I'll keep the post updated if they bother to respond, but given their ambivalent reaction thus far, I'm not holding out much hope.
NT
Well after a month of complaining all it took was a technician here for 45 minutes and we're back to normal!
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