When your business relies heavily on a decent broadband connection (by decent, I’m using Eircom’s 3mb business line, though the upstream isn’t huge), its a pure pain in the ass when you have to spend the first part of your morning (about 40 minutes) waiting on hold before speaking to someone.
Actually, I never got to speak to anyone, it just kept going on and on. All I needed to know was if there was a line fault in the area. You contact an ISP I used to work for on tech support and the IVR system kicks in telling you theres a fault in your area to save you waiting on hold and yesterday I was informed they even send you text messages and keep you updated during the day!
So the broadband went.
We waited.
And waited.
By lunchtime I had to go home to send off print orders for jobs, check the mail and return to the office. Nothing by the afternoon.
So I resorted to dialup (56k – we pulled out the dual ISDN back in the summer to make way for BB) – borrowed a laptop (as I now refuse to install modems into any machines I build), found a length of spare phone cable I had and dialed in. 15 minutes to check my email, download a 250kb PDF and return to my office. The killer was, there was an error in the PDF so I had to ring to arrange another one to be sent as waiting on mail was going to be a joke – and fair play, they sent another one immediately, so I waited a further ten minutes (seen as the pages were cached it was running a little quicker) and got my updated PDF – which I then faxed away…. who the hell sends a fax any more?
Bottom line is, I have no idea how any Irish business could rely on dialup for their internet access and not make the move over to broadband. That and I can’t fathom the fact that one of the country’s leading ISP has to take more than 40 minutes to answer a tech support call to tell me whether or not it can be fixed or when the service goes live. Especially when every 3 minutes they tell you how important your call is!
Damn John for kicking my ass in Call of Duty for the last hour of the day!
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