I don’t know exactly who is to blame, but Heidi and I have been royally dicked around with our telephone and internet connections the last month or so.
First, our telephone just stops working. We call iiNet and they tell us to talk to Telstra. Telstra tells us that it’s the phone (even though it been working for a 9 months now). We try a different phone, it also doesn’t work. No surprises there. Telstra say we need to get them to come over, but we need to organise it through iiNet. We call iiNet and they organise for Telstra to come over, but someone has to be home. They can’t give us a specific time, so we give them a mobile number for Telstra to call half an hour before they arrive. We get no telephone call, but the next day Telstra claims they stopped by and nobody was home (even though I was waiting). We organise another time for them to come out. I take a day off work. I get a phone call saying that it’s working now and they don’t have to come out after all. All this after 10 days of dicking around.
So that was incredibly irritating. 10 day with no landline. Numerous mobile phone calls, 2 days waiting around, and the whole problem of getting another phone when they just had to check their end and fix the bloody problem!
Second, our telephone and ADSL are disconnected on the 22nd. Heidi had called on the 21st to inform iiNet that we are moving and asked that they disconnect our line on the 22nd of December. Even though she went to great lengths to emphasis this fact, they disconnected us on the 22nd of November. Now that happened in less than 24 hours, so surely they could reconnect us in a similarly short period of time. No such luck. They said it could take up to 48 hours. We still aren’t reconnected (3 days later). Fine, they made some sort of human error. That’s forgivable, but you would expect them to have standard operating procedures in pace to avoid this sort of thing, and when something does go wrong you would expect them to make every effort to correct it as soon as possible. Instead we were told:
- “You’re lucky that you’ve been connected for more than 6 months since you won’t incur the early disconnection fee”
What a load of crap! Just to get to this point (where we may be connected by Monday) has involved over 3 hours of telephone calls from a mobile phone. We now have a direct number to call, but that was only given to us today after 6 request to speak to a manager (which were obviously all questioned/refused before the last one was begrudgingly accepted).
While on the matter, almost every telephone call to iiNet had to be from a mobile phone (clearly our landline wasn’t working) and started with around 30 minutes on hold. We’ll be sending them a bill for all that. As for the gross inconvenience of not having a telephone line or internet right when we are organising to move and need to find new tenants for the place we are renting, and arrange our relocation, I don’t know how they can make up for that.
This is freaking ridiculous! What happened to iiNet service!?
Update: Fixed after 1 hour on the phone today (Monday, 29 November)
Update2: Data rate is now much lower than before (1.5Mbps/256kbps). Yay, disconnected for 5 days and then reconnected at a slower speed.