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View Full Version : Aaaarghh!!! Installation Woes.. Teeth.. Gnashing..


EqUaTe
01-02-2007, 12:41
*prelude* Hi folks! Just joined :) *end prelude*

Hm.. I increasingly get the feeling I've made a foolish mistake..

I've been with Telewest for about 3 and a half years or so, and never had any issues.. In fact the net only went down once or twice the entire time.

Now, at the start of January (the 7th), I moved house. A few days prior to this (I believe it was the Thursday, which was the 4th) I called up Telewests national movers line, and spoke to a very helpful chap named George.
He arranged for me to get a 'new' account with NTL (as I'm now in an NTL area as opposed to a TW one :sob: ), as their so-called new systems don't allow them to transfer from TW to NTL. An installation date of Friday the 26th was confirmed, for between 8am and 1pm.
All well and good so far.

This is where it changes though.
Sure enough, the engineer turned up (at 9.30am, for his _first_ job), and proceeds to locate the cabling.

First, I'm told that he can't install the phone as the telco cable hasn't been run with the coaxial, and he's a one man crew. OK.. Fair enough on the last part, but surely NTL should have known this? They new it was a block of flats, and my guess is that they were aware I was on the 2nd floor (there is lots of cabling all of the back of the blocks of flats..).

After this, he proceeds to run the cabling for the cable modem, drilling through a few walls and such to get it to where I want it to be, and then using the usual cable clips to fasten it to the wall.
He then connects the external cable to the master socket that he attaches to the wall in the master bedroom, and wires everything together through this.
Before he goes _back out_ to his van to get the CM (an NTL 250 - little blue thing.. ugh), he asks me if I have my PIN number for the account. I know nothing about this, it having never been mentioned prior to this.
He tells me to call their customer services to get the PIN, if he doesn't have it in his van.
He comes back with the CM, but without any PIN.
Next, he hooks it up, notices that the sync light is flashing, and the ready light is not on.
He disconnects it, plugs the coax into his tester device, sees no signal, and goes off for half an hour or so (He said he'd be 5-10 minutes, tops).
In this interim, I contact CS to get the PIN. Perhaps unsurprisingly their system is down, and they can't get me the PIN at this time.
The engineer finally comes back, reconnects the CM, and says it should be working now.
It isn't. I mention that I was unable to get the PIN as the system was down, and he says this is probably why the CM was unable to 'lock on'.
My mistake was to believe this.

After getting the PIN, and checking a few things, the situation remains the same.
I proceed with the standard checks (I'm an IT Manager, and know my way around these things very well - self trained.. Matter of pride really).
Nothing. Nada. Zilch.


I then proceed to spend the rest of the day on the phone with NTL, and getting passed off to telewest more than once, despite it being an NTL account. Late afternoon I manage to get them to book someone to come out and resolve the problem, but not until Wednesday morning - which means I have to take time off work.
I eventually call the movers line again, and speak to a lady named Susie or Sophie (I now forget which), who put me on hold, called a supervisor (I believe in despatch), and came back to me saying that he'd told her he would have an engineer out to me first thing the next morning, as his first job.

Knowing this means somewhere probably not long after 8am, I struggle out of bed on Saturday morning. By 10am, I've still not had any contact from NTL and no engineer has been booked.

I then spend several hours on the phone, being given the run-around again, get told that they can't reach the engineer but that he should be coming, get told the area's installation manager (a Mr John Hill, Greenwich & something else) was looking into it and would be calling me back shortly.
90 minutes later, no phone call, so I call NTL again.
Eventually, after several more calls, lots of aggravation, and an extreme amount of the buck being passed, I'm told that an engineer was never booked in to come to my property on Saturday. Aargh!
They then proceed to tell me that the earliest they can have someone out is Wednesday afternoon - it takes me 3 attempts to get them to check my account and confirm that the engineer is still booked to come out on Wednesday morning.

Come monday, thinking it might be a faulty modem, I try to talk them into changing the modem MAC address on my account. After (again) getting passed around between telewest & NTL, both CS and tech support, I eventually speak to someone who (after a lot of nonsense) tells me it cannot be done until my account has been activated - which requires me to connect with the supplied NTL modem (which I had to give THEM the mac address of in one of the earlier calls).
Once this has been done, apparently I will be able to change the mac to that of my motorola surfboard sb4200 (Has anyone actually done this before? If so, did it work?).

Anyway... Wednesday morning arrives.. It gets to around 11.30 and the guy finally shows up. This guy is a technician more than an engineer - he's there to test things, replace the modem if necessary, and possibly correct internal wiring issues.
The first thing he does after being shown the modem is unscrew the coax and connect it to his tester. No signal.
He traces the cabling back to the master socket and checks that. Everything inside the flat is fine, but there is no signal on the line, which means the engineer didn't finish the installation - it's not plugged into the box outside.

The guy (I believe his name was Camille, or something like this), called one of his colleagues, and was told to ring a guy named Chris in 'Repo'. He does this, and is told to get the job number & details emailed over.
He rings despatch, who say they'll do this, and that I should expect a call about the matter later that day, and hopefully it be resolved before the end of the day.
By mid/late afternoon, there's been no call, so I ring in to customer services again, most unhappy with the whole situation.
I'm told that one of two people will be calling me before the day is out. Noone does.
I ring back at 7.30pm while on my way home from work (I only had a half day out), and am told that they finish at 5, so won't call me until tomorrow, but the girl did forward the complaint on again.

At 11.11am today, as I have been typing this out, an employee of NTL named Jonathan (spelling could be wrong, too many spellings of the name!) rang me.
He initially did not seem to be aware of the issues with the broadband installation having not been completed. He was in fact calling about the _phone_ service that I am, to be perfectly honest, less concerned about at this time.
I said to him that he was correct that my phone service had not been installed, as the cable hadn't been run originally (according to the engineer), and also told him that the broadband was not functional, and I was most unhappy with the situation.
His reply was that he was passing it on to the managers for my area, and I should get a call back over this matter within the next couple of hours to confirm when would be a good time for them to come and sort out the problem.

Thankfully, I should be able to arrange it so that my wife is in and if there are any questions they call me.
I didn't want to do this on Wednesday because I'm the technical person around the house - she much prefers not to be involved.



Anyway, I'm now almost a week on from the installation date, have no service yet, and am very unhappy with the whole situation.
At no time have I been offered any compensation, and I've wasted a great deal of time on the phone to NTL. I went with them because they'd merged with telewest which I believed would have improved their inet service, and because of the virgin media rebrand - with Branson having insisted on much improved customer services.. So far this seems to have been a mistake.

Does anyone have any suggestions for what to do to get this resolved quickly?

Honestly, I'm not expecting anyone to call back today, despite the promises - they've been broken too many times so far. The call this morning was only the second time I was called back at all, the first being when I got my PIN.
If I've heard nothing by ~2pm I'm going to begin the process of chasing it up again, but I've had enough of this.

Needless to say, considerable amounts of expletives have been used to describe NTL in private..
Right now, the polite way of saying how I view them is that they appear to be useless/incompetent monkeys. :monkey:


Gah!


Help? Anyone?

zovat
01-02-2007, 13:00
Hi EqUaTe,

firstly :welcome: to the site.

It sounds like you have had a pretty bad experience of NTL's install process, but there are a number of people on this site who may be able to chase this down (some of the guys have very good links into NTL)..

I would suggest you keep chasing them, as they do have some good CS people, (just not all of them) and hopefully they will get the right people on this.

Hopefully one of the guys here with NTL contacts will be along shortly..

Zovat

EqUaTe
01-02-2007, 13:27
*hopes*

It would be nice.

It's frustrating, as I had a great experience with Telewest.. I'd had them before as well, and again it was great.

All in all it just leaves me feeling more than a little disappointed.

Thanks for the welcome though :)

EqUaTe
01-02-2007, 16:35
Ok, I had a call about 5 minutes ago, and I've now got it arranged that NTL will come and sort the external wiring for both broadband & phone, and then run the phone wiring inside the house so that everything should be running.
The appointment is for Saturday morning - should be between 9.00am and 12.30pm.

Yay.

They'd damn well better show up and it be working though..

I was offered tomorrow afternoon, but I'd prefer to be there to be completely sure that everything is working, as my wife isn't really sure what to check, but I can't take another half-day out this week.. Way too much to do.. Bah.

Anyway.. If it's working on Saturday, I'll post on here to let folks know :)

punky
01-02-2007, 16:45
:welcome: equate, although I wished it could have been under better circumstances.

If the problem isn't resolved fully on saturday and you're still getting the run around, PM a member of the team with your account details, and can pass them on to our contacts with NTL. It really does seem discraceful.

Moved to the installtion section

Paul K
01-02-2007, 16:47
Do not let the engineer leave the premises until you have a lock on your modem at the very least. Even better if you can make the engineer wait until you prove that everything is working.

EqUaTe
01-02-2007, 17:08
Thanks Gavin :) If it does turn out that it's still not working then I will do.
Sorry for posting in the wrong section - was too frustrated to read through the list of available sections.. :whistles:

Paul: that was my plan. The lock is the absolute minimum I need to be sure it's working, but I plan on making him/them wait until I've done the account activation/registration.

As I said earlier.. Monkeys! :monkey:

EqUaTe
04-02-2007, 13:45
Yay, I'm up and running, and they even installed my phone service.

Though my CM says it's not providing the service I'm paying for, so I'll be back on the phone tomorrow to see about that..