Call themselves a communications company

What sort of total bloody idiots actively ignore communications?

Our favourite telco have changed their systems now so that when we update a fault they say Please note only the parameters "CP contact & access details, hazard notes, and appointment info" will be actioned.

I.e. they are now ignoring the note deliberately.

This applied even when the note we are adding is "The fault appears to be fixed so you can close it now".

Sounds like time to make our system automatically email our account team every update.

If google can do it so can I

Well, except I have used an IEC16022 (datamatrix) barcode from my web site 4.gg.

How not to make a web site

Barclays on-line banking allows me to update home/work email and phone details.

Seeing as they said no email logged, I clicked on the update, filled them in and got :-

"30505 - Sorry - we have not been able to carry out your request. Please try again later."

Really helpful.

I tried a few times and got the same.

Then I spotted in the update page :-

"NOTE: Where updates are required to both the Work and Home details, these will have to be completed separately. For example, the work details should be updated and then saved by selecting the green 'Save' button before returning back to this screen to complete the Home details or vice versa."

WTF?!?!

• Why have that restriction?
• If you have that restriction why create a totally nonsense cryptic error when someone does not notice and tries to add an email address to both home and work at the same time?
• If you have the restriction how hard is it to grey out the home details as soon as I edit work details or have them as separate update screens?
  

Mad...

Sky eco hype?

OK, having crashed my sky box I restarted it and get a nice red and greed sky logo with an iguana on it saying... "We all can do our bit to be greener. By switching your sky box to standby, together we can save enough energy to light all the homes in Birmingham for a whole year..."

WTF!

Whatever saving is made is on-going. If everyone switching sky boxes to standby saves enough energy to light all the homes in Birmingham then surely it does so forever, well, as long as people are still switching to standby. Where does the "for a whole year" come in?

Did I miss something or does eco hype not have to make any sense whatsoever?

Making your own rules

Well, almost as good as moving the goal posts - I thought I'd give people an insight in to the fault handling of our favourite telco.

Believe it or not they do give us a very tiny amount of compensation if they don't fix a fault in 40 hours. It is often not even money back for the time the fault lasted so not worth much, but we make a point of getting them to pay anyway.

However, the 40 hours is the time it is with them. And they run the clock! i.e. the time while they send back for re-test, even when they know it does not pass their own tests, does not count.

So, for example, we have a case were we reported a fault. It was definitely a fault there end as it affected a number of lines, and they were all fixed at once. We added a note that the fault had finally been fixed about 2 days later, so well over the 40 hours.

Some 46 days after reporting they finally close the fault. That is no comment, no update, no feedback for 46 days!

OK, so we did not chase anyway as it was actually fixed, but still, 46 days! What kind of a system allows a fault to just stay open for 46 days.

Anyway, they finally cleared it - claiming we cancelled the fault (not true) and saying the total clock time was 39 hours 36 minutes.

WTF!!!

The annoying thing is they don't even care. We won't get a sensible explanation or anything.

New tariffs

OK, this is on my personal blog as you can post comments and ask questions. But basically AAISP are looking at new tariffs.

However, we have a slight difficulty because we have so many choices. I am not sure of the best way to offer simple clear and understandable tariffs which are fair.

Basically, we have three types of line:-
1. 20CN, and these are gradually being moved to 21CN over several years
2. 21CN
3. BE

The lines have different base costs, with 21CN being lowest, 20CN costing maybe 30% more, and BE costing a lot more (about 4 times a 21CN line).

The lines have different usage costs now, and this will be even more the case from January. BE lines are the lowest. From Jan 21CN lines will be around 6 times as much as BE line and 20Cn lines around 15 times as much as BE line.

So we need to dream up tariffs and options that fit and handle people with multiple different types of lines, but are understandable.

For a start, I am thinking we separate line cost and usage. This also helps with min terms on BE lines (6 months) as that could be line cost only with usage stopping when the line is stopped.

However, usage is complicated. Current ideas include :-

1. Charging as now, based on GB, based on time of day, and preset usage levels and excess charging, but different rates for different types of line.
2. Having usage levels, e.g. 1Mb/s committed with bursting but with automatic limiting after an hour or two to ensure usage never averages more than committed rate and so no risk of excess usage charged
3. 95th percentile billing with a base commit level and higher rate over charges.

All are possible, but we don't know what people want to do.

It is also not clear how best to handle bonded lines with say 21CN and BE where the usage is different but we in effect have to commit to 21CN side for the total to allow for BE breaking.

So, I am open to suggestions on this.

Timescales are that we would probably launch BE lines on some sort of new tariffing system in October, but the 20CN/21CN lines on a new tariffing January.

Comments?

Back to reality

Well, expensive holiday, but that was the idea. Never again will I say "don't worry about the price" in a hotel buffet. Mind you "Of course you can have a pampering day in the health club at the hotel" was a maybe a bit rash of me. The main thing is we all enjoyed ourselves. F1 was fun. The whole holiday was fun.

We even had a Singapore Sling in the Long Bar at Raffles. And I now have a new suit that fits perfectly. Well, you have to if you go to Singapore don't you.

Of course, the second we are back in the UK we have things go wrong. Two hour wait for the pre-booked taxi (well, for the replacement from the AWOL pre-booked taxi). So we waited in Starbucks. At least in Singapore you can understand what they say in Starbucks, and can understand the taxi drivers. Not sure that was true this morning on either count.

Now back down to Earth, and even though I have booked Thu/Fri as holiday I think I will be busy. Something screwed up usage stats from the bills, so I have to fix that rather urgently. I am sure it is something simple, but re-constructing correct data is always fun(?).