I spend most days working from home, so my broadband connection is particularly important to me. Therefore, deciding to change supplier was not necessarily such a great idea, considering the catalogue of minor disasters that befell me as a result.
When I moved into my current house, I decided to be nice and simple and get a Telewest line installed to cover my television, broadband and phone line rental. It all worked fine and I had very little to complain about. Except their advertising. One radio station in particular has been carrying an especailly annoying advert from Telewest which offers customers a package for £30 a month (instead of the £75 I paid), and get free line rental when you have a television bundle. The one catch is that this offer is exclusively available to "new customers only". I'm not, so I don't count. After hearing the advert just too many times, I finally flipped and cancelled my subscription.
I decided to change to a company called Bulldog Broadband (which is owned by Cable & Wireless). They offer a service to inner London only with speeds up to 4MB/sec, about twice as fast as my Telewest connection. The offer seemed good, £40 a month, £60 connection (because I don't have a BT line) and two months free, with a modem priced at £40. I signed up in early December and eagerly waited to be given a date for installation.
By the beginning of January, I was beginning to worry. With my Telewest connection due to be turned off on the 5th of the month, I was facing the prospect of being entirely disconnected from my business world. So I called Bulldog to be told that February would be the earliest to expect an installation. Fortunately, when I called Telewest, they agreed to extend my broadband and landline for a month.
Then, halfway through this month, the inevitable happened. There, on my favourite radio station, was a new broadband advertisement. This time, it was from Bulldog, and it was offering charges of £30 a month, free connection and a modem for £1 (instead of £40). Of course, this was exclusive to "new customers only".
Now, forgive me if this sounds a little obvious, but as I had not yet been connected to Bulldog or received any of their services, I considered that I deserved to be considered as a "new customer". I made the call to their helpline. When I was told that I did not qualify for this introductory offer, I asked to cancel my order. The operator told me that I would be subject to a cancellation fee for the engineer's visit (which had not yet happened, despite more than a month's wait). Confronted by such insurmountable opposition, I decided to stick with my order.
About two days before the engineer's visit, the broadband modem arrived. But it was not the one that was described on the telephone. It lacked a vital socket that would connect it to my PC, and so would be useless to me. Another call to Bulldog, who said they would take it back.
I popped into their office, at Portman Square in the West End, to find that they are moving. Taking advantage of this situation, I walked straight in and plonked myself next to their press officer. Despite being very helpful, and arranging for a refund on the modem, I am still waiting for a response on the reasons for some customers being charged more than others for exactly the same goods and services.
It is important that ISPs such as Bulldog take this issue seriously. When you charge an early adopter more for a service than a new customer, you will risk alienating some of your most loyal customers. In a sense, as an early adopter, I subsidise the later users of technology who have the benefits of a product refined thanks to guinea pigs such as me.
I tend to be an early adopter. I got a 3 mobile phone when they came out partly due to their cheap call rates but mostly out of intrigue for third generation mobile services. I paid £25 a month for the service, which was awful and with poor customer services based in India. To add insult to injury a few months after I got my phone, they offered half price line rental, inevitably to "new customers only".
Having ditched the useless modem, I decided to order one from an online retailer called ebuyer.com. I found one that matched the requirements, ordered it and paid a bit extra to get an express delivery and get the connection up and running as soon as the engineer visited. True to their word, I did receive a ring on my doorbell from a courier, but unfortunately my modem was not with him; it had been sent to someone in Birmingham by mistake. ebuyer would refund me the extra for the delivery as it had been a wasted investment.
At this point, I decided to ring ebuyer, but was greeted by a friendly but pre-recorded message saying that the company does not provide customer support by telephone. Their customer service is available by web only, through a system called e-notes. But you can only have one e-note "open" at a time and guess what? I'd already had a dispute with ebuyer when back in October ebuyer failed to deliver some broadband equipment I had ordered for my sister. They had claimed at the time that it was signed for, but the friendly people at the courier company said that, as no one was in, they left the package in a "safe place" by her back door. For those of you that live outside London, you may findd this innocent enough, but my sister's house backs on to a Hackney council estate. Suffice to say, she never got her equipment.
So I searched Google for "ebuyer complaints". I was dismayed to see a catalogue of websites devoted to people who have had problems with ebuyer, with many having failed to receive delivery of their orders, or if they did, they were faulty, and were refused refunds by ebuyer and then unable to contact the company (as I found).
None of this was very encouraging, but it did allow me to uncover the head office telephone number. I called. After waiting eight minutes for the phone to be answered, asked to speak to their press officer. The line went dead. I phoned again. After about four minutes of waiting the phone was answered and I managed to say, "I'm writing a column for the Times Online. Can I have the details of your press officer? Please don't hang up on me this time." I got given the details of their PR agent and put in another call.
And so in the end I did receive the modem and I am promised to get a refund for my sister's missing items. But I do wonder. If I had not said I was writing this article, would my complaints have been dealt with so readily? It may be significant that ebuyer refused to explain what caused my problems, nor would they discuss the problems faced by the many other customers that have been posted on the internet. "Unfortunately, we have recently found that there have been times when our rapid growth has affected our ability to deliver on our promise to our customers," was their simple statement.
All in all, changing broadband providers proved to be an immense hassle and given the choice now, I would have just stuck with Telewest. Thankfully, I own my own e-mail address, because if I did not, I'd be really stuck. It's just not possible to move your e-mail address from one ISP to another, but then nor can you move your landline telephone number, either.
There was one advantage in being stuck at home dealing with all my broadband mess. During the whole period, I was unable to make any trips to the gym, and so did not get to listen to the advertisements on my car radio, so I've no idea if Bulldog or any of my other service providers have reduced their prices "for new customers only".
Click here to read a report on how Britain is among the world's most expensive suppliers of broadband services.
Benjamin Cohen is the founder of QuickQuid. He will be writing an occasional diary for Times Online on life for a small businessman in the tech sector
