I have now been without broadband for 3 days the cause of which is a disconnection of my service by City Fibre. This was a planned disconnection ordered by Vodafone and scheduled for Monday 6th March after I gave notice to cancel my contract several weeks ago. On Saturday 25th February I negotiated a new contract with Vodafone and the cancellation was cancelled.
At 12:22 AM on the 6th of March (Original cancelation date) by broadband service stopped working. Of course, anyone with an ounce of common sense or at least fundamental support skills would have taken this piece of information, joined the dots and at least investigated the possibility that despite the disconnection being cancelled it still could have taken place. Any fragment of optimism I might have had was destroyed when I contacted Vodafone support. I was told that this was a fault! It couldn’t be anything else as it quite clearly said on the Vodafone system that the disconnection had been cancelled. There was absolutely no slight possibility that a disconnection could have happened because the system said so.
After many calls and IM chats with various Vodafone teams around the world I was told that the “fault” had been logged and that someone would call me in 24 – 48 hours. 36 hours later I received a call from someone at Vodafone giving me some time slot options for a City Fibre engineer to visit my home and it was agreed that an engineer would call to confirm that a visit would happen today at some point.
Both my wife and I work from home and are therefore heavily dependent on a reliable broadband connection and although we managed to limp along tethered to our mobile phones this was proving difficult mainly due to the fact, we get quite a poor data signal where we live. This caused me so many issues that I had to give up and travel into London this morning to my company office although I was mildly optimistic that the problem would be identified and rectified today so I wouldn’t have to travel down to London again this week. Oh, how naïve I am! So, my wife got a call from Vodafone this morning to say that City Fibre had in fact disconnected the service on the 6th as I had suspected. On this basis they had cancelled the engineer visit and would put her through to the “Activation” team to reconnect us. Upon reaching the “Activation” team she was informed that the service hadn’t been disconnected because the system said that the disconnection had been cancelled and that anyway they couldn’t do anything because they needed an order number. They also couldn’t reconnect her to the team who she had been passed from.
Several IM conversations and phone calls later she got through to a team who spoke with City Fibre and has now arranged, we think to reconnect us. This won’t happen for another 24 – 48 hours though because that is the City Fibre agreement with Vodafone I suspect.
I judge a company on how it sorts out mistakes and rectifies problems. We all mess up on occasion but provided the entity that messed up listens to your problem, investigates and resolves it in a timely manner then I personally don’t worry too much. Vodafone have proved yet again (this is not the first issue with them) that their support organisation doesn’t work. Whether it is the quality of those employees and their ability to take ownership of a problem or perhaps company culture that prevents original thought and a willingness to help I simply don’t know. All I do know is this fact. City Fibre disconnected my broadband service intentionally due to a mistake made by themselves or Vodafone. I told them as soon as their support line opened on the 6th March what I suspected had happened. Between my wife and I we have spent somewhere in the region of 8 – 10 hours chatting on IM or on phone calls to Vodafone regarding the BB failure. Even though one team finally tells us that the service was disconnected the next team tells us again that it wasn’t. After more conversations and different teams, we are told again that it was disconnected. In addition to the hassle and stress of all this I am now having to commute to London at £40.00 a day.
As a side note I am a pro broadband subscriber which amongst other things gives you mobile backup if the service goes down. I also spent several hours trying to get that working and speaking/chatting to Vodafone about that. To date that doesn’t work either. Pro service! Waste of money.
Conclusion: I must decide as to what I do going forward. I could cancel my contract with no penalty as I am within the 14-day cooling off period or stick with them and hope that this get’s resolved in 24 – 48 hours. I could sign up with another provider but even those smaller companies who claim to give better service are reliant on the big provider network backbones and infrastructure. Maybe just the ability to talk to a single individual who takes ownership of a problem and sees it through to conclusion would be more bearable even if it still takes several days to resolve the problem. The only thing I know right now is that the Vodafone support structure is not fit for purpose.
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