So I have been with out the interwebs for two months.
Because of this I feel it should be classified as a utility as your life become more complicated as a result.
The minor issue are things like not been able to update your phone/computer (Curse you iOS 9) and being able to catch up with tv on iPlayer and the like. These thing are not necessary but can be a pain. I do not really watch on time any more.
Where it get painful is when you miss an email from your Dad updating you on his rather delicate heart condition. This compounded by the fact one of your work college accidently erase your phone whilst you are at work. Restoring your takes a long time when you do not internet.
Currently I am sitting in a Costa drinking a coffee and waiting for my phone to restore from my backup.
The whole incident started when my Fiancée and I came back from holiday. That was in the 30th of July. Now at the time of writing it is 5th of September and I will not up and running with the internet till the 16th of September.
Every time I call up my Internet Service Provider (EE) I get a discount or free product of some discription. If this carries on much longer I will start getting paid by them for the internet.
What really pisses me off the most is that the issue is not related to my ISP. It caused by Openreach being incompetent. It is because unique way in which the internet is supplied to most of the residents of the United Kingdom (now that the Queen has become the longest living monarch should that not be Queendom). Bt Openreach own the the cable and the exchanges that run to my flat but the Internet that is run over those cables is supplied by a seperate ISP, in my case EE.
So when we came back from holiday my fiancee found she could not access the internet and a letter from EE telling that were leaving them and we could charged an early cancelling fee. I was alarmed by this as the letter said they would be charging just under £6000 in cancelling fee. I called them tell them I had no interest in changing ISP and thought the fee was way to high. I was told as the day I called them was the transfer day they could not halt the exchange but the cancelling fee was £60 not the thosands in the letter. They gave a name of the company that it transferred to and that so called “Slamming” common with ultiities. Slamming is when one of your Utilies is transfered to an other supplier with out your permission.
Well a frantic couple of hour without any luck finding who had taken over my internet, I had a thought. Part of the apartment block that I live at is a flat with the same number but rest of the address is different apart from the postcode.
Low and behold when I spoke to the nice lady whoe lives there I found that she was trying to get internet service and had having no end of issues. Her service was supposed to go live on the 30th of July as well. This had not happened for as it was connected to my Flat now.
So I tried to get my Internet reconnected but kept getting told that the line belong to a different ISP who would not let it go. For some reason BT Openreach could not tell our two flats apart. So when I pointed out this to lady calling from openreach trying to the lady in the other flat and I pointed out she have difficulty as the line is connected to the wrong flat. I said “if you think that is bad then imagine how I feel.” She did the muture thing and put the phone done on me after a long pause.
This resulted in openreach send an engineer out to fix the other flats line but made things even worse for my fiancée and I as since that point our flat has dissapeared from Openreach’s systems. So we do not exsist and are not eligble for any of their services. Which has made EE job of setting the internet up for us even harder.
What frustrates me the most is that if I could talk to openreach I could get this fixed. But that is not how they work. I have to ‘liaise’ with my ISP but when I try and do this Openreach denies that it has any responsiblity for the issue. If I look at their website I find that it is not setup to help people and the issue I have with them making me disspear from their systems but a quick search on the interweb reveals the CEO email. I shall see what happens when the engineer comes out on the 11th.
