Well I have just received the promised follow up call from Voda (see post number 10.)
We ended the previous call with an agreement that the rep would call me back today with specific information about what caused the problem, how it was fixed and whether it could happen again and, to his credit, he actually went some way to answering those questions. He told me that they had been told not to give customers any technical information about the outage but had agreement from his manager that he could tell me as I had been so insistent.
He told me that the problem was caused by a fault in the BT broadband network whereby bandwidth was restricted "in certain locations" and Sure Signal "which requires at least 3Mb to operate" wasn't able to operate because of this. I questioned him on this as the outage appeared to have been national rather than "in certain locations" and also pointed out that only Sure Signal appeared to have been affected but he stuck to his script and wasn't able/willing to tell me any more.
In terms of my second question; he told me that the Sure Signal problem was fixed when BT fixed their bandwidth issues. The implication being that Vodafone themselves were not involved.
As for my third question; he couldn't give me any assurance that this would not happen again as, with all complex technical systems, problems can occur from time to time and "no telecoms provider guarantees to be available 100% of the time."
In many ways this leaves more questions than answers as it doesn't explain why people are still disconnected, doesn't explain why only Sure Signal seems to have been hit while other systems are working and, given how flaky and variable most of us find out broadband speed to be usually, doesn't explain why it happened suddenly, and only once.
I tried covering these inconsistencies with him but he had already gone as far as his knowledge (and scripted response) was going to go.
I then asked him why they had not kept us informed, why they had denied there was a problem for at least two days and why they are still refusing to respond to questions about this outage. At this point he started leafing through his "Call Centre Big Book of Platitudes" and apologised for any inconvenience I had suffered, promised to pass my comments on and hoped he could now close the case on their system.
It was clear that to take this any further I would have to escalate the complaint and wait in for another call from someone who also had a copy of the Big Book so I let him close the case.
I estimate I have now spent over 100 minutes on the phone to these people over this issue and that is 100 minutes of my life that I will never get back!
The next time I have an problem with some aspect of the Vodafone service, rather than contacting their call centre I've decided to poke myself in the eye instead; It's as likely to fix the problem, will be much quicker and probably won't hurt as much.
:smileywink:
.png "Moderator (Retired)"){kind=icon}
