p2pnet news view P2P | Mobiles:- Recently, I was a hair’s-breadth from becoming the name on a traffic throttling class action, but my wife and daughter told me in no uncertain terms the two cases I already have against me, plus a couple more potentials in the wings, were enough, thank you very much.

For myself, I’d have loved to have been on the other end of a lawsuit. But there were distinct penalties in the unlikely event the case didn’t succeed.

Liz, my wife, and Emma, my daughter, already put up with an awful lot from my online activities. So regretfully, I declined.

Anyway, I’m on a Shaw business account and when we first moved to Vancouver Island, a rep – a very nice lady – called me to explain I was going over my limit and I’d better carefully monitor my account (there was an online app which gave me my useage stats).

Either that, or ‘upgrade’.

So I upgraded.

That was nearly five years ago and I didn’t know any better, then. Honest.

So here I am, still with Shaw and I admit,  although I had to upgrade, the tech support has been good, which is more than I can say about Telus, with whom I briefly had an online account.

It went bad from the first minute and after a week of back-and-forths with supposed techs, supervisors, etc, did no good, and after an unpleasant encounter with one of the Telus folks, we abandoned it —- but not before a struggle over the contract.

Deny deny deny

Anyhow, in`La vie est Bell` (cough, cough), we featured a comment post from Samson, an ex Bell-Canada tech, the subject being ‘traffic throttling,’ aka ‘bandwidth management‘.

Among other things, “How did they ask you to handle questions about p2p throttling?” – we asked.

They, “essentially said to deny deny deny,” he said.

He also told me, “I could complain all day about how bad Bell Sympatico is run form top to bottom.  But a lot of it would be the fault of the call center and Bell’s lack of communication.  And by Bell allowing it to continue.

“Specifically, I would mention the practice of sending the first 2 non-billing-related calls to an Indian center in New Dehli before you would be directed to an agent in Canada.

“This is obviously to discourage people from complaining, escalating, or getting answers, since the Indian reps do not really have the ability or the skills to fix any issues.  On the third call they are considered ‘multi-callers’ and put in a cue for my call center.”

In a Reader’s Write to the story, “Bell ‘tech support’ is a joke,” Bugaloo stated, going on »»»

 I`m a network admin, tried to trouble shoot my uncle`s faulty dsl connection from Bell, after getting past the 1st and 2nd level Indian call center, the “Senior Tech” in Canada concluded my network card was faulty, well just to humour him, I told him to hold and I grabbed a spare NIC and replaced it in the PC, rebooted , voila ! Same crap, the DSL line was still down.

So after shooting down the “Senior” tech rep, they finally gave in and promised to send a tech over to troubleshoot the line within 3 days. This was over 10 days ago now, no one has shown up yet, but don`t worry , my uncle is still getting billed for all the service he is not getting.

In another comment post, Samson responded »»»

I was a Senior Tech. And the Senior Tech Troubleshooting flowchart, actually does end with “PC Issue’. Some of these senior techs never owned or operated a computer before. Most never held a previous position in the company or any related field. And have no additional training besides basic customer service and phone skills. “Follow the flow chart, its all in there” they say.

I consider my self pretty computer literate but troubleshooting why someones internet does not work is not always very easy. And the flowcharts were crap, any agent there that knew somewhat what they were doing didn`t refer to them at all.

If the DSL light is on. And the PPPoE software says its connected. We are at a dead end and call it a PC/unsupported issue. Despite obvious patterns and scenarios like the previous poster mentioned where every part of PC and physical setup was replaced.

I frequently heard situations where someones internet working was dependent on their phone being off the hook. Months of these calls and still every time it came up we had no answer except to dump on bell home phone, sending them in a vicious circle.

And the techs that actually go on site call us to troubleshoot the issue, the same line regular customers do. They really are only good for plugging stuff in unless by chance you happen to get one who learned networking on his own.

Stay tuned.

Jon Newton – p2pnet

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This entry was posted on Monday, August 11th, 2008 at 6:34 am and is filed under Mobiles, P2P. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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