myrddin.org: weblog

We moved house a few weeks ago into an almost new town house from an older town house of around 1 MILLION years old.. (ok, I exaggerate.. it was only maybe 20 years old) so we are pretty happy. The cats are happy too ;P Not unlike a lot of other people, the owners of our previous place decided it was the right time to sell and the new owners wanted to move in. Luckily enough we knew this was coming for maybe a year before it happened so it was no great surprise.

The move itself was rather uneventful which was great. Took a few days off work to do the move which was really handy. The only problem we really had was pertaining to our ADSL relocation. This actually turned out to be good in a way as it gave me almost a week and a half with no internet access and a good excuse not to play World of Warcraft. This allowed me to catch up on downloaded TV episodes. It was quite amusing that even though I had a lot of downloaded TV episodes that I hadn’t gotten around to watching for months yet I was still ahead of the Australian Free to Air broadcasts of the same shows.. Australian TV is really quite pathetic

… I did write a whole lot of shit about Internode and my decision to change ISP’s but I deleted it in favour of a condensed version instead. The reasons essentially came down to the following:

- Internode screwed up my relocation request causing over a week long outage
- Was connected for 2 days then suffered an 8 hour outage, on a day that I was intending to work from home *arugh*.
- Automated Internode relocation process whereby they create an alternate account (username_new) and do some kind of a switch over when told by telstra that the new location had been provisioned didn’t exactly work in the automated fashion as it was intended.. yet another Internode fuckup :\
- 3 phone calls to Internode’s support and/or accounts teams whereby the calls averaged 50 minutes of on hold music before speaking to a human.
- One of the above phone call instances involved a support person verbally promising to return my call within 1 hour but this did not happen, I had to call back and *wait* again..
- 2 of the above mentioned phonecalls started outside of their indicated peak periods so I’d hate to see the wait during their peak periods.
- Internode released new but significantly more expensive plans
- I refuse to pay more than $100 a month for internet (I’ve gone by this personal rule ever since the dial up days)
- Internode cannot provide me with ADSL2 yet other ISP’s (iinet in particular) can.

Furthermore when I tried to cancel my service there were the following issues:

- Cancellation could only be done online.
- Online account cancellation was again poorly worded where ‘not required’ fields _were_ actually required to be filled. In this instance I left contact mobile number as I *obviously* would no longer have internet access to get my mail. That and I wanted to ensure that if they contacted me it was by voice. This caused the form to fail and I had to resubmit with the additional contact details.
- After submitting the form, a week passes by and I did not receive as much as a verbal or email confirmation that my cancellation was recieved.
- Followup email to their accounts department yielded no response.
- Followup phonecall again was on hold for 30 mins (they do have a callback service which in this instance I used but didn’t get a call back for quite some time afterwards)
- The return phonecall advised that someone had just then actioned my request and sure enough 10 minutes later I could no longer gain access to my home machines remotely.

*peers up* even in point form the above is still a long list of irks that I had with them..

So.. now I wait patiently for Telstra to remove the codes from my line which will enable me to get ADSL2+ from iinet. Past experience from other guys at work indicate that this will only take a couple of days so we’ll wait and see..

Filed under: m.o