Follow up to This Bloody Thing Called Worldcall and Bloody Worldcall… continued

It’s been a fortnight since my Worldcall-issued modem died and they still haven’t managed to give me a new one. What a bunch of incompetent twits.

In the last week, I’ve received four calls from them with each person asking me the stupidest of questions:

• What type of modem do you have? (Webstar DPX-2203. Shouldn’t you know this already?)
• What is your modem’s MAC ID? (Twat, the modem’s with you, not me. I don’t know.)
• We have your complaint listed. What is the problem? (I told him to read the file. He did, said sorry and hung up.)
• Can you clarify that your address is correct. (I told him, he said okay and hung up.)

On Monday, I called them and asked for an update. I was told that I will get a call back. I did get one about two hours later. The man was polite, seemed understanding and spoke with some authority. He wanted to know why I had my VoIP telephone connection listed at one address and the Internet connection for the same account listed at another address. I told him that I didn’t. He said I did. I said I didn’t.

Eventually, I figured out that when I transferred the connection nine months ago to my new home, they mustn’t have updated their VoIP records. Why do they have separate records for VoIP connections when it’s all dependent on the same hardware and account number? God fucking knows.

I told him that I hadn’t ever used the VoIP aspect of the connection and had actually asked them to stop the service about a year ago. He responded with another question, “Why do you have a VoIP modem then?” I replied that I don’t just decide which modem I should have — I take what you give me and you never exchanged my VoIP modem, so I just continued to use it.

Eventually, after all of this frustration, the man apologised for the delay in getting me a new modem and committed that I would have a new one “tomorrow,” meaning Wednesday.

Wednesday came and went without a visit or a phone call from Worldcall.

I called again today and told the support person that I would be disconnecting the service if I didn’t get a modem today. He said he has emailed his superiors and I will “definitely” receive a call in a little while. It’s 12:25am now and I never got that call.

However, I did manage to make a call of my own this afternoon — to Maxcom. Their sales person was at my house promptly at 4:30pm. I filled out the forms and I should have two new DSL connections in about three days. I’m kicking Worldcall out of my office as well — dumb shits just lost two accounts for the price of one.

I’m done chasing Worldcall now. But, I will wait to see how long they take to get me the new modem, just out of curiousity. It’ll be amusing the turn the techie away at the gate, whenever he does turn up. Poor guy — he’s going to get an earful from me, even though he’ll probably have no idea what for.

Good riddance.

Technorati Tags: worldcall, karachi, isp, disconnect, maxcom, customer support

Follow up to: This Bloody Thing Called Worldcall

Well, someone arrived at my home on Saturday at 7pm (who comes to provide tech support at 7 pm anyway?!) and plugged in my modem to a wall socket. No lights turned on. He agreed with my expert technical diagnosis — it was dead. Now they know that I’m not lying!

It was taken away by the tech guy and he said they’d either get it running or issue me a new one by Monday evening, at the latest.

Here we are. It’s Tuesday afternoon and I have no modem.

I called the telephone support a few hours ago and the man read out my job status to me (he was soft-spoken too. I really think it’s a job requirement!). He said that it should get sorted out today, lastest tomorrow, because “these things take time” — they have to requisition a new device and they have to update my MAC address in the database; stuff that’s really time-consuming.

So, I guess I’ll wait while they go in to their store room, unbox a modem, enter some digits and colons into their computer, hop on to a motorcycle and ride over here.

Followed up by Bloody Worldcall’s Been Kicked Out

Technorati Tags: Worldcall, ISP, modem, customer support, joke

My level of frustration with my ISP, Worldcall (aka Go4B), has pretty much peaked. This morning, my internet connection was plodding along just fine till about 7am. Then, rather unexplainedly, the modem just died.

It's a Webstar DPX-2203, so it's a VoIP enabled device that has a battery pack attached to it. This appendage was the only thing that had a light burning. All of the modem's lights were off, including the one marked AC Power. This, inspite of the fact that the AC adapter was working fine.

I called their telephone support and explained that none of the lights on the modem were on and I think that the modem has a problem. The woman, kind as she sounded, proceeded to ask me to go to my computer and check the ethernet cable to my PC. Now, that would generally be the first course of action with an Internet problem, but, as I kindly repeated to her, THE MODEM IS NOT WORKING. IT HAS NO LIGHTS ON!

I think she figured out that it was a modem related problem, rather than something I had unwittingly done to my computer and put me on hold. She came back two minutes later and issued me a complaint number.

About four hours later, I got another call from Worldcall tech support. Another soft-spoken woman on the other end (is this a job requirement?) asked me what was wrong. I told her, just like I told the other woman, that the modem's lights are not turning on and my Internet connection is down. She said, "Thank you." and hung up before I could ask what was next.

I then commandeered my office modem and plugged that in at home. It was working great — even faster, by a precious few kb/s, than my own modem — but then my Internet died again an hour later.

Thankfully, this time around, it seems like a problem with Worldcall itself, rather than the modem, because its light are on and flashing like they're supposed to be when the ISP's down. I know this because Worldcall is down a lot. When things go south every other day, you get pretty good at figuring out what the status lights represent!

Anyway, I'm connected via Bluetooth to my cell phone and surfing along at whatever it is that Ufone's GPRS speed permits (it's not fast!). Thank God for that. At least something's allowing me to get work done (yes, getting "work done" includes posting to this blog).

I was reading on Worldcall's forum a few days ago that they've relaunched their 64kbps package for Rs.650 and I think I'm now going to downgrade to that and relegate this company to my secondary connection. A few of the other ISPs in Karachi, namely Maxcom, are well reviewed and probably deserve my custom because of their better service offering.

It's a pity that Worldcall is so bad, because we all had high hopes after learning that they've invested $40-50 million in their infrastructure. However, they still can't seem to get things right three years after launching in this city and I think, five years, if one was to include their Lahore operations.

Followed up by Bloody Worldcall… continued and Bloody Worldcall’s Been Kicked Out

Below is an ad from the print edition of today’s DAWN newspaper. The ad is issued by Gerry’s DNATA, which is a part of the Gerry’s Group of Companies and that group also contains an ISP called Gerry’s Net.

What I find remarkable about is the email address at the bottom — it’s a rival ISP’s domain (Cybernet).

You’d think that, in this day and age, a tech-saavy group like this would manage to get their own domain for consumer communications. And if, for some reason, a $10 domain with email forwarding is too steep (the ad cost approx. $7000, btw) not, then at the very least there should be some sort of group policy about using each other’s services.

It doesn’t at all speak well of Gerry’s Net when it can’t even host email for companies within its own group.

This tweak worked well for me, even on Karachi’s achingly slow and latent WorldCall.

Give it a go and see if it works for you.

Make Firefox Faster - Forever Geek