Well, don't get shocked with the title, it's actually living in a house with no internet access!
It started down last week, when I was thinking of shopping around for a better deal in broadband, and the best deal I could have got was from o2, my mobile provider. When I rang them up, they said, I need to have a BT line in order to access their broadband services, and hence I had to transfer my telephone line as well.
Just out of curiosity, I asked, how long it takes to port over the broadband, and they said, 4-5 working days! Well, that should not be a problem for guy like me, who has internet access in the office (apart from certain sites :P though). Then I contacted BT, that I need to port my telephone line from Bulldog DSL back to BT, to which they said that it will take about 11 days to port over. This is to provide the existing provider substantial amount of notice, wherein they can pretend, they have better service, by offering the customer discounts, or freebies. Bulldog did exactly the same, and they offered me a straight 30% off on my existing invoice amount, if I stayed with them.
But because I will be having a better deal from my new provider, and have been facing blackouts from Bulldog, I just decided not to accept the offer. Then I called up O2, to inform them that my telephone line will be taken over by BT on 13th of this month, so I would like them to kick start my new services sometime then. I was expecting that they take the early notice, to minimize the down time and may be able to provide me the broadband asap.
Now comes the tricky bit. O2 can only start the process, after they see that the line is a BT line on their system, which would not have been the case till 13th of March! So they asked me to call back on 13th of march. I called up on 13th just to know, that their system sometimes takes time to get updated, and it might take upto 24 hours to get the fresh(!) date from BT.
So called up on 14th, and the gentleman kindly did take all the details off me, and placed my order. The estimated date for the start of my broadband service was given as 25th of March! What???
The reason given by the O2 support staff was as follows. Basically they need to pull out the network cable from the BT router and plug it in the O2 router at the local telephone exchange, which astonishingly is about 5 minutes walk from my place! To do this job of say 1 minute maximum, they need to apply for the appointment with the BT exchange support manager. He will give a tentative slots of appointments, which needs to be matched with availability of the O2 network engineers. This date has also to take into consideration the time it takes for the O2 to ship the free Wireless router (which I was ready to sacrifice, for getting an earlier date).
So this comes down to about 12 days of internet blackout at my place, and hence all my schedules of making the site live by the end of March are shattered to pieces!
I just imagine, what did people do before internet?
It started down last week, when I was thinking of shopping around for a better deal in broadband, and the best deal I could have got was from o2, my mobile provider. When I rang them up, they said, I need to have a BT line in order to access their broadband services, and hence I had to transfer my telephone line as well.
Just out of curiosity, I asked, how long it takes to port over the broadband, and they said, 4-5 working days! Well, that should not be a problem for guy like me, who has internet access in the office (apart from certain sites :P though). Then I contacted BT, that I need to port my telephone line from Bulldog DSL back to BT, to which they said that it will take about 11 days to port over. This is to provide the existing provider substantial amount of notice, wherein they can pretend, they have better service, by offering the customer discounts, or freebies. Bulldog did exactly the same, and they offered me a straight 30% off on my existing invoice amount, if I stayed with them.
But because I will be having a better deal from my new provider, and have been facing blackouts from Bulldog, I just decided not to accept the offer. Then I called up O2, to inform them that my telephone line will be taken over by BT on 13th of this month, so I would like them to kick start my new services sometime then. I was expecting that they take the early notice, to minimize the down time and may be able to provide me the broadband asap.
Now comes the tricky bit. O2 can only start the process, after they see that the line is a BT line on their system, which would not have been the case till 13th of March! So they asked me to call back on 13th of march. I called up on 13th just to know, that their system sometimes takes time to get updated, and it might take upto 24 hours to get the fresh(!) date from BT.
So called up on 14th, and the gentleman kindly did take all the details off me, and placed my order. The estimated date for the start of my broadband service was given as 25th of March! What???
The reason given by the O2 support staff was as follows. Basically they need to pull out the network cable from the BT router and plug it in the O2 router at the local telephone exchange, which astonishingly is about 5 minutes walk from my place! To do this job of say 1 minute maximum, they need to apply for the appointment with the BT exchange support manager. He will give a tentative slots of appointments, which needs to be matched with availability of the O2 network engineers. This date has also to take into consideration the time it takes for the O2 to ship the free Wireless router (which I was ready to sacrifice, for getting an earlier date).
So this comes down to about 12 days of internet blackout at my place, and hence all my schedules of making the site live by the end of March are shattered to pieces!
I just imagine, what did people do before internet?
No comments:
Post a Comment