Things I am interested in…

Picnic in the park

3 01 2010

Watch where you put that hand, young lady!

Posted via email from attobrute’s posterous

Date : 3 January 2010 at 19:47
Comments : No Comments »
Categories : Uncategorized

Letter to Telecom NZ re problems with connectivity…

2 01 2010

My wife & I have a Big Time broadband plan with Telecom, and on the whole we are happy with it (though currently our maximum speed is a tad on the slow side, being so far away from the exchange).However, in the three years since we moved into our new home we have had intermittent problems with connectivity. Last June a very good technician from Chorus completely rewired the line where it connects to the house, and most of the problems seemed to disappear.

All was well, except for the intermittent dropouts that everyone seems to experience, until New Year’s Eve, when we had a serious loss of connectivity from ~0630 to ~0930 when I contacted Telecom.

Unfortunately, our broadband was again disconnected for almost the entirety of New Year’s Day, except for a brief period of maybe an hour in the afternoon. The broadband remained disconnected until ~0930 today (Sat 2 Jan), when it mysteriously reconnected.

Multiple resets of our modem did not achieve anything. The Telecom Help Line was closed down for the public holiday.

I find it hard to believe that there is a sudden problem with our home network setup. It had been working fine for several months, and I had not changed *anything*. There has been a demonstrable problem with the external Telecom side of things (which the Chorus guy appeared to fix).

My concern is that we are reliant on an internet connection for a number of things. Most importantly, my wife works from home, and her work absolutely requires a stable internet connection. We back up irreplaceable personal data, such as photos, via web based services. I can monitor web cams at home, as well as the status of the home server, from the internet.

This is not even including more routine uses such as web browsing, email & VOIP communication. We were unable to communicate with overseas friends and relatives yesterday to wish them a happy New Year.

Section 3 of your Customer Terms (‘Our Commitments To You’) states you will:

“provide [Services] with reasonable care and skill”; “make all reasonable efforts to ensure our Services do everything we say they will”

It also states that you “will try to restore any Service outage as soon as [you] reasonably can.”

I accept this, and also accept that you do not make any guarantees of 100% problem free service. Like I said, any occasional disconnection is to be expected.

However, when the disconnection is for greater than 24 hours, and there is no recourse to remedy the problem then I become concerned. Especially when there is a history of problems with the connection stretching back intermittently for nearly three years. Even more so, when the livelihood of our family depends in part on being able to access the internet in a timely fashion.

I await your response to this email with interest. That is assuming our broadband connection is working, and I can actually read it!