Liquid Water

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Is it criminal fraud

As you may have seen on the company status pages we get a wide variety of responses on fault reports. This is especially clear when it is a single common cause of a fault and all the same report text, which our favourite telco clearly simply do not read!

What gets me is the sheer number of wrong statements they make in order to send a fault back to us.

These statements are not just mistakes but are outright lies. For example they claim to have carried out throughput tests that show the user maximising their upload (so?) when the user has not in fact used the line for months (i.e. it's a backup line). Clearly they have not done the tests they claim and they clearly do not show the result they claim. They are just making up LIES.

Why do it? so they can send the fault back.

There is compensation (pence) for having a fault open for 40 hours, and sending it back stops the clock. So these lies result in a financial gain for them.

Lying for financial gain is criminal fraud. Its illegal. People can go to prison over it. Companies can get big fines for it. It is not allowed!!!

So, do I just report this to the police? It really is starting to piss me off.

The plan is to try and get the whole fault system improved. This will probably take many months. We're pointing out the criminal fraud anyway and asking not to be lied to. That is just one thing that needs improving.

Ho hum.

And people find our statements confusing

Council sent us a statement dated December. They list the total charge, the amount received and the amout due and the payment schedule. They all make sense. Amount received is what we had paid by that date and what the payment schedule says we should have paid by that date. So why send a statement I wonder?

But wait, they also have a column saying "total due" on the statement which is different to the "amount due" that they show in the main body by around £150?

And better, they list the total charge for the year as a different (lower, nice!) amount than the actual rates bill we got at the start of the year. This means we have now actually paid too much.

And odder still, they also sent a cheque, for an amount that does not fit with anything. Their own statement works out that on the date the cheque sent they think we owe them. And its not what we have over paid, or the difference in the charge originally and now, or well, anything. It makes no sense.

How on earth do councils manage without basic adding up skills? Is the rest of the government like that (silly question).

Liquid Calcium

OK, my toothpaste proudly proclaims "with Liquid Calcium®"

WTF?

(a) How can you trademark something like that. It's a simple name of something that exists already?!?!

(b) How can they just lie like this? Anyone that did any chemistry knows it is clearly a lie. According to wikpedia the melting point of Calcium is 842 °C. If would not put something that hot in my mouth!

When are we going to get someone with the guts to stop adverts telling blatant lies like this?

Its like "unlimited* text" with small print "* 3000 texts per month". So the word "unlimited", meaning "no limit" is used where there is in fact a limit.

Hybrid

Well, we are working of a hybrid of shit and fan today with our favourite telco.
Seems some senior management not aware of congestion fiasco.
And I have copied press, so they will hassle their press office for official response.

We wait and see if they consider a shite service acceptable or not. And if they do, a lot of ISPs will be finding a new faviourite telco, not just us. We have had a good service for 9 years and now we have congestion, latency, loss, and reduced throughput.

Well, lets see what happens.

The dreaded tie pair modification

Why is it less disruptive to change the telco we use for a broadband line than to get our favourite telco to actually fix a fault?

The answer is the dreaded tie pair modification or TPM.

The tie pair is a link from the main frame where the wires for your phone line get to the exchange building, to the DSLAM and back and then on to the phone exchange itself.

It is possible for this to be faulty, but not that common in our experience.

However, our favourite telco will use a TPM to rectify a fault some times. We find that on the whole faults are fixed by a random selection of a repair action rather than any logical diagnosis of the fault. That's just our view from what we see. But sadly it means that some times a TPM is chosen. We have seen several over Christmas. The cynic in me says that it is an easy fix as it gets rid of us (so they think) for 3 days which is after Christmas.

The problem is that this is done with no consultation. The first we hear is a fault update saying a TPM has been ordered and it will take 1-3 days.

AND THE CUSTOMERS LINE GOES OFF-LINE

WTF! Why? Apparently the process is to disable the existing (and typically mostly working) port immediately and then request an engineer move the service to a new port on the DSLAM (1-3 days) which is configured ready to work. So the line goes off for UP TO THREE DAYS.

Of course, there is no way to cancel this once it has been started.

But wait, it gets worse. We are told today that when they say "1-3 days" they mean "1-3 working days". WTF?!?! That could be 1 to 7 days in reality.

Bear in mind this is all for a fault repair process that is meant to fix faults within 40 hours.

So, I suspect this is the first of the broken parts of their fault process to tackle this year.
It is totally crazy.

Happy New Year

Well, I'll try and play WoW a bit over the weekend. Maybe try and level. On 73 now...

After that it's all back to work on Monday. Doing new XML interface stuff to our favourite telco this month. That should be fun.

I guess I'll have to dream up some advertising and marketing this year. That will be fun. How to try and attract more technical customers.

Should be an interesting year.

So Happy New Year to all my readers.