This bunch of cowboys make Virgin Media look highly proficient.
Supposedly clara.net are a competent business grade ISP. Their pricing would certainly suggest they should be, at their rip off levels. Indeed my firm has found itself paying for a ADSL Max connection at twice the price that truly unlimited business grade ISPs such as eclipse.net.uk are charging for their up to 20meg ADSL. Companies such as Be, Pipex and even BT are even less money.
You are signed to an annual contract. OK standard for many ISPs, but at the end of that period, if you haven't cancelled three months (yes three months) before, you are automatically locked in for another year. You aren't contacted to give any offer that they might be able to move you to a better speed package. It's best to say the customer is ignored.
Over the last fortnight it's been my misfortune to be trying to contact their technical support in order to transfer my domain registration and migrate the ADSL. Despite being a customer, they require stuff on headed paper for authentication, so email support tickets are useless. So you fax them. I know they got the faxes because of the time stamp. But they loose them. Or if you can speak to a real person (vitually impossible), you find the fax went to the wrong queue, despite using the fax number specifically listed on the support pages of the website. Email support tickets are equally ignored or if you do get a response it is many days later.
Worst of all has been the support phone lines. I'll never complain about VM's overseas call centres again. At least Virgin Media answer. I've given up trying to call clara.net. You can be hanging on the line, held in a queue for an ever repeating "your call is important to us" message, and yet the system cuts you off after an hour (yes it was that long), 20 minutes or whatever timer they impliment this time. I wonder how much money they get as a share of their 0845 number calls.
The final insult to injury is transferring our ADSL line to a new provider. Apparently because we cancelled our services (as their terms required all those months ago) we can't have a MAC code. That would require clara to reinstate services and start us on another year's contract at their rip off prices. It's taken 10 days to elicit a response to the fax / support ticket (you can't speak to the people concerned as they aren't in the call centre) to find that A MAC can only be issues on a live service which has more than 30 days to run. Why would a customer know that? So maybe I should have known, but would many customers? When the cancellation notice was sent those months ago, it would have been nice to have had any form of acknowledgment, even by email saying sorry to loose you blah blah and reminding us of the transfer limitations.
Ho hum, you live and learn.
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