Broadband Complaints Calls Outnumber Support Calls December 06, 2007
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As if you didn’t already know, the quality of broadband in the UK is patchy at best and the support customers get, nothing short of criminal.
According to the latest JD Power survey, 2007 UK Broadband Internet Service Provider Satisfaction Study, customer satisfaction is down on last year with customer complaint calls outnumbering customer support calls - 52% to 48% - for the first time.
Worse, the average time each broadband customer spends on ‘Hold’ is a staggering 17 minutes, waiting to get technical support from their supplier.
“The 2007 study finds that call waiting times continue to increase when customers contact their ISP, with customers now waiting an average of 17 minutes before initially speaking with a representative,” said Caspar Tearle, director of service industries research at J.D. Power and Associates. “Complaints to customer service departments have risen again in 2007, and now outnumber customer service-related questions for the first time (52% vs. 48%). With customers of most suppliers paying from their own pocket for these calls, these high levels of complaints come as no surprise.”
The only upsides are that broadband is now cheaper, averaging £21.10 per month, down from £25.91 in 2006, and the average speed has increased from an average of 3.5Mbps in 2006 to 4.87Mbps.
I imagine that’s ‘quoted’ speed, not ‘actual’ speed because I know lots of folk – including me – who are not getting anywhere near those rates. Are you?-Martin Lynch
[JD Power]
Editor and Contributor | Martin Lynch
Contributor | Tamlin Magee
Comments
Having 'fixed' my line, making sure that only TWO wires are connected to the master socket from any extension, my connected speed went from 3.5mbps on a good day and 2.9mbps at night too.... (drum roll)... 5.5mbps during the day and 4.9mbps at night!
I also suffer from a lot less drop outs, I used to get at least one an hour in the evening. It made on-line gaming impossible.
I moved 4 doors down the road and my connection speed dropped from a steady 4.5mbps to 2mbps with frequent dropouts.
I put an ASDL faceplate on my BT masterbox and its helped a lot. This has the benefit of seperating the ASDL and telephone lines at the source. I'm now connecting at 7.5mbps at the router and getting around 6mbps on the speed tests.
Has anyone tried replacing the free cable you get with your adsl router for a `high speed` modem cable? I did and went up from 4mb to the advertised 8mb.
I agree, UK is just behind on broadband. America's connection is amazing. All you have to do is go on Xbox Live into a game, and it shows everyones connection.
All good and green for Americans playing, but it's all rough red for the brits.
As for service of UK ISP's. They're a disgrace. It's ridiculous. My connection always cuts out too, and all the support does is tell me to turn everything off and back on again.
Yeah.. good one.
I love the Orange Broandband message you get, when phoning up their Tech Support line because the 3 monthly internet connection has come around again...."All our operators are busy with calls at the moment. We'll try to answer your call as quickly as possible. However, if you visit www.Orange.co.uk your answer may be on the support pages."
How the heck are you supposed to view the internet, when the connection is down???
We just had our phone line refitted from the telegraph pole to our house due to some idiots tree branch bringing the line down. I don't seem to be suffering from any lag anymore, like I did before the refit, but, even though I'm supposed to be on 8mb and being only 1.52 miles from the exchange according to an exchange search for my bandwidth, I'm still getting under 1mb!!
The wait times for customers could easily be cut if these companies made use of their own service. Click-to-Talk solutions would allow customers to connect immediately with the tech support line with very little waiting.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/ip-telephony/?p=2424
My house is some distance from the exchange, the house is equiped with old telphone wiring, numerous outlets and several handsets via filters. I have a 2mb service and my average download speed is 1.9mb. My only complaint is the upload speed at about 1/10 of the download speed.
Since "upgrading" to BT Total Broadband 3, I get an improved daytime speed of 5.5Mb but evening speed is a disaster. Lowest so far measured is 0.497Mb. It's hard to believe that it is even that fast, as web sites time out!
haha, the technical support for talk-talks broadband is a joke, i spent over the course of a month of my broadband going offline 24hours on hold to the useless tech support. thankfully it wasn't in one sitting. i've since spent at least another 4-5 hours when it's gone down again.. as for speed i aint even gonna go there.
the funny thing is, the 1st mammoth time i had to deal with it, i finaly got through to the only UK call center they seem to have which is the infamous level two of tech support. when i spoke to the guy all the other call centers in overseas had gone down (possibly due to demand of support) and the uk support guy said that they managed to solve 95% of problems callers had within 15mins so they were going to keep the other lines down for the rest of the day to see what difference it made to the service...
shame they never thought to change it as two weeks ago it was a 55min hold time before i actually managed to speak to someone with worse english than my 2yo nephiew.
I am having the same problem with the internet in the village of Needingworth (Cambs). My ISP (Virgin) has been notified of the problem and it seems there are other perople with poor 250-300k up and 600K down with regular dropouts. Come on BT or whoever why should we be paying for unlimited and getting "limited" in both speed and even connection.