its been a death by a thousand cuts, but perseverance won the day
we’ve come a long way from being told by our internet service provider Slingshot more than three weeks ago that all the vdsl & adsl ports in the cabinet were full and there was a waiting list which the longest waiter had been on for 161 days, and so no internet connection for us, sorry
whilst the vdsl wait list was true, these were people who had adsl and were simply waiting to upgrade to vdsl if ports became available. the ‘no adsl ports available’ bit was at worst untrue & at best the result of poorly maintained network records
i guessed the email address of the CEO executive of the national telecoms network operator, Chorus
fortunately he elected to stoop to the front line of customer service and i received a call from the Chorus head of networks in less than 2 hours. impressed, & very grateful.
i wasnt after special treatment but i desperately needed a connection to run this business. i get cross when i am told that no broadband is available in a city with a population about one & a half million, especially as i spent most of my corporate life in telecoms and have a few ideas about what is & isnt possible
the only alternative being permanently tethered on a 4G mobile connection or a satellite connection, both of which are a lot more expensive than terrestrial connections as permanent solutions, or wait for fibre in 2017
it seems all the vdsl ports in the cabinet are used, which is fine, i’ll settle for adsl. but to be told there are no adsl ports is nonsense. Chorus are in the process of commencing on a fibre rollout program so i understand they are not willing to invest further in the legacy copper network too
Fortunately Chorus’ head of networks took a similar view and within another two hours i could get an adsl port in the cabinet no problem
then it went back through the normal channels and to cut a long story short, some weeks later we finally have a connection. field engineers ringing once and then cancelling the job when i didnt answer rather than rebooking it did not help
we have a ping of 9ms & 15mbps bandwidth. nothing special when compared with fibre, but i’m very happy with it. all we ever wanted was a connection so we could run our business
Thank you Mark Ratcliffe CEO, Chorus for getting us an internet connection
Reiss.