NTL suck

My broadband has been down for a fortnight and attempts to persuade ntl to remedy this situation have so far been utterly fruitless and frustrating. I have spent a total of approximately 5 — 6 hours on hold and have wasted one day at home waiting for an engineer who did not show up. After numerous calls to find out what was going on, someone left a message on my answerphone saying “we cancelled the engineer because, as someone should have told you, unfortunately broadband is not available in your area so there’s no point sending an engineer out”. The fact that I’ve been happily paying for and using broadband in my area for two years notwithstanding, apparently.

Absolutely no light at the end of the tunnel at present. Clearly, no–one gives a fuck about my problem and the current technique seems to be to deny all knowledge of the complaint each time I call up, requiring me to reinitiate the complaints process with the same total lack of results. Utter, utter, bastards. I am rapidly reaching the point of just canceling the direct debit to precipitate some contact from the credit control people, so I can at least have the opportunity to explain that I have no service and will not be paying for something I am not getting.

Do not deal with these people.

UPDATE 07/10/04: Finally all fixed by a friendly and helpful engineer. The box that was causing the problem was several blocks away and apparently the fault would have taken out broadband access for the whole area. The engineer said he was disappointed not to have found about about the outage earlier, since he was responsible for the area and didn’t like to think that it had been out for long. We said that we’d been trying to get a message through for some time, obviously without success. As a professional member of the ntl team, the engineer was obviously unable to comment about efficiency and attitude of the call centre staff.

UPDATE 22/10/04: Came across this survey in Which? Magazine showing the percentage of customers of various broadband providers who expressed themselves very satisfied with the service:

Surprised that it’s even as high as 30%, to be honest.