I moved house at the weekend (didn't take me a month, and I didn't need to take anytime off work hint hint LMAO), and the ONLY service provider thats dragging its heels is my ISP.
Sky came round on SUNDAY, yup easter sunday to sort out my TV, BT got the phone switched on yesterday, but my ISP is the ONLY one that won't give me a date as to when my connection will be back on, WHY?
Its not like its a new phone line, we have taken our number with us, our new house is all of 160 metres away from the old one, so why the bloody hell can't they just switch my internet over?
Not had more than 30 Minutes down time in 3 years of service from KeConnect Fastest available speed here is 8mbit and i am connected at 7.8mbit and download speeds from anything like 750-880 kbs
Unfortunately it's just not possible (I work for an ISP*). It's related to BTs systems, and they're all crap. You must cease and reprovide so that BT can take money for something they otherwise would have no claim over.
I'm sure it's related to postcodes, CBUKs and other such pointless crap that exists from 10 years ago but really has no place in modern connection-giving. BT own you. You're their bitch.
*Sadly THUS is not officially an ISP any more, we're just a reseller since Cable & Wireless took over. And I work in Customer Service, not Sales or Tech Support, so don't come shouting at me if you have a problem.
Without saying much I can say that I have first hand experience about it all, and I am not going to defend or attack anyone here, but there are more things to the case than it often looks like.
In most cases where you are moving you ADSL and it gets problems, it's caused by either 1 - the service man that are going to do the work in the central where you get internet from (to say it blunt and easy) 2 - a mistake by the system, and not a human failure.
Now we do all agree it sucks big time, and ain't much of a fun beeing left out without internet for maybe weeks because it seems the company just don't give a damn about you. In many cases it's actually wrong, and what seems to be a easy sollution is not that easy at all. First off, system errors does occurs every now and then. "Why not getting better systems then?" would be the natural question for that, but sometimes it ain't just that easy to change systems over night.
The other thing is the service man / electrical that is doing to physically move the line. By that it means some cable work on the central and maybe some work at your new place, dependable. In most cases where it gets dellayed it's nothing the ISP provider can do anything about. ISP providers don't have their own service mens, they order it from other companies and ask them if they can do the work. In most cases it's the service man's company that screws up, does mistakes or just generally can't deliver in-time. For custommers you won't hear that, but maybe get various reasons why it's dellayed because of the custommer support is nervous or the custommer doesn't understand / want to understand / don't agree , and it all ends up looking like the ISP screwing it up.
Again, this is generally, and I am not even in same country, but this usually is the thing over in Norway. Companies can be good, avarage, less than avarage and S-H-I-T, and there without doubts are some black sheeps out there. But please take it into consideration before going all out on the custommer support
Edit : and distance is in most cases irrelevant. Even if it were 50M it would in most cases be as much work as if it was 5000M.
No idea what it's like in other countries, but here in the UK the ISPs are not allowed to touch the exchanges. Because the telecom network was built by BT, it's their property and as a result only BT engineers are allowed access to them. All they need to do is take out one card (the previous ISP) and put in a new one (the ISP you're moving to). Just like switching out a network card at home and every bit as simple. But they don't do it, presumably because it costs them money to send a van and pay a guy.
When we moved house (keeping the same number and the same ISP) it took them 4 weeks to get our connection sorted, because BT were putting their own customers in front of non-BT customers. So they can boast a great turnaround time when compared to everyone else.
I still think that Ofcom should buy all of the hardware so that it can be run independently and on a first come, first served basis.
Well, to be fair, I think the normal time is 10 working days, regardless of how far away you've moved.
Talking of moving, if you're going to move, surely to another part of the country to escape the in-laws?!
Try ringing them up, and asking to talk to the supervisor of your ISP's phone thing. They tend to be British so you should be able to understand them. Tell them you do a chunk of your work from home and need a connection, and can't understand the holdup!
Do you have any remotely idea just how freaking anoying those smarty-pants people are, that yells at ya "BUT I AM WORKING HOME CRY CRY!!!!!!! I AM WITHOUT INTERNET FOR 5 MINS AT I LOSE MY JOB!!!!! OH MY GOD WORLD DOESN'T EVOLVE AROUND MEEEEEEEE!"
Dano, that was not pointed to you, just generally the ones saying they got "so much important work to do" home is jackasses. If you really are that dependable to do work home you should get mobile broadband, thorught TV, radio or anything more secure.
@TVE: I am a home worker, I supervise a department of programmers in India, and I am maintaining the corporate servers whilst my boss is on extended leave. I am about to move home. Whilst being without internet would not be the end of my life, it would meen that I am going to have to travel to our research lab daily (I dont have a car, it's cycle from village to town+get train+cycle across other town) and work in a freezing cold research lab with no kettle i'd touch on grounds of hygeine. Now whilst I maybe able to jack or borrow wireless access I do not wish to rely upon that, and therefor would like to minimise the amount of travelling I do by ensuring a fast changeover. EDIT: This is rellevent, as if servers go down when I am at home I am adding some hours before I can even get to an internet connection to fix things.
In my current home I have had no choice, i'm in a mobile blackspot. I have BT Broadband, they are the major supplier over here, and responsible for the backbone of the majority of British comminications.
I move house next month.
What would your advise be, given you are in the industry, of moving with the least amount of disruption to my working life?
Pay for a business broadband connection. If you're not already on one then you'll have to put up with the standard residential processes involved.
My advice (as an insider) is to make sure that you have given everybody involved as much notice as you possibly can. Unfortunately the ISPs are reliant on BT to do the changes on their network before they can do what they need to do. IF you are changing ISP then get a MAC code off your old ISP (see here and here) and give it to your new ISP along with the exact date you want the service switched, they will then "order" the migration between your ISPs from BT. However, BT will have to have provisioned your new line at your new premisis before the broadband service can be migrated, so they need plenty of notice in order to get this done first.
Because they are crap. Change your ISP. There is absolutely no excuse for an ISP to at the very least give you the provisioning date provided to them by BT for the day the telephone will be live in the new premisis. The ISP then only requires a maximum of 5 days after the line goes live to provide a broadband migration (from BT) on a new telephone line.
There really are not much you can do if you are moving, but to cross your fingers. Your situation, country situation I mean seems to be more troubled than here in Norway. In Norway there aren't much of problem with cooperating between companies, but seems problematic in your land.
Hmm..
Well, Wifi, AKA radio / satellite ADSL, have you checked for possibilities to have that?
Got in last night, spent 45 mins on the phone, after being cut off once, only to be told what I already knew, it would be at least 5 days before my connection is on......
This morning, I got up, flicked the xbox360 on to have a quick blast "Danowat32 has connected to xbox live", WTF?, so it seems, overnight, my connection is on, go figure.
Its odd, however, I am hoping, as everything was the same as before, location, phone number, ISP, connection details, etc etc, it was just a case of BT having to "flick a switch" at the exchange.
Yepp, seems like the physcal line were there, and everything was plugged on right.. probally some information they had to feed into their system and it solved the problems.. But I don't understand why it happend on night time.. Well, guess you'll never know, but if it works well good hehe.. Still, would be fun to know what they did, that made it work overnight.
The automatic migrations happen at 12am midnight. That's how the system is designed to work. It's like this so that people don't have interruptions to their service during the day and that the new service will be working first thing on a working day.
That could be the thing. Still strange nobody could give that information to Dano. It's not like a big thing that need to be hided from people. Guess the custommer support didn't know
