Vivaciti - delay in getting a MAC code

I joined Vivaciti more than a year ago knowing very well that I would never be able to get very high speeds but should comfortably get 4Mb or so through their Murphx LLU (Tiscali) package. And that was indeed the case for the first 6 months or so. However, in the past 6 months my speeds have dropped to an abysmal 1Mb-1.5Mb. Despite several emails and promises of this issue being looked into nothing has happened and my connection is now barely useable.

Having had enough, I have decided to try my luck elsewhere. To that extent, I asked Vivaciti for my MAC 2 weeks ago through their ADSL panel. Yet, I still have not received it. I have phoned them up repeatedly since the first request only to be told a different story each time. The first time they claimed that the request had been misplaced and the MAC would be generated and emailed to me. Suffice to say the email never reached me. A couple days later, I got through to a gentleman who said that his name was Carl and is the managing director. He said that the he would send me an email with my MAC code but would also look at the issue at hand to see if they can resolve it. Once again the email never came through. Lastly, I phoned up yesterday only to be told that in fact that the MAC has not been generated, that there was an issue with the ADSL supplier, they had no idea when they would be able to get a MAC for me and that basically there was nothing I could do about that!

So in essence, I am being held at ransom by a company which is failing to provide me with a service that I am paying £25 for every month and which is clearly in breach of the stated 5 days for providing a MAC code. Can anyone help me on how I can escape from this predicament?

Thanks in advance

Lodge a formal complaint with the supplier stating that if your MAC requesy and complaint aren't handled to your satisfaction within, say 14 days, you will be escalating the complaint to CISAS, the ADR prodivder that vivaciti are signed up to. (www.cisas.org.uk)

Going to CISAS is at no cost to you - they costs of any complaint to them are borne by the ISP in question.

Ionic,

Many thanks for your suggestion.

I have now sent a formal complaint to Vivaciti. Let's see what they come back with. Another 2+ weeks of being trapped and paying for a [censored] service is not exactly appealing though...

Thanks

Vivaciti are quite active on this forum though, maybe they'll come on and reply to this thread?

If posting on this board helps resolve the issue I will gladly withdraw my complaint. However, the fact that I have, in essence, been lied to for the past 2 weeks does not bode well...

Hi,
Sorry you are not happy with the response you received, I have had a quick look at your case, and can see you had reported some speed issues, with our last reply to you on the 11/07/2011 saying we can request an engineer but as you had not swapped out the router if it turned out to be an issue with your equipment this would be chargeable, if you accept this we can proceed. We never received a response to this from you, and as such the ticket auto closed.

As we have stated to you, the MAC had been requested, we had been given the MAC for your line, but when we checked this (we do with all manual MAC's that are issued) it showed the MAC as invalid. We had requested from the carriers for a new MAC, and have still not received this from them, we have been chasing daily.

We can only give you the MAC once we receive it, and as soon as we have this it will be sent over to you.

Thank you for looking into this and for finally providing a clear explanation as to reasons behind the delay in getting the MAC. Finally I know what is going on. It would have saved everyone the aggrevation if this had been communicated earlier and I had not been mislead by false statements by your colleagues.

As for the ticket raised, I have clarified this through the support ticket raised today.

Just out of interest, have you had your MAC & if so, how long did it take as I've had a request in from the start of the month...

In reply to a post by gwynevans:

Just out of interest, have you had your MAC & if so, how long did it take as I've had a request in from the start of the month...

Vivaciti or UKFSN, as per your sig? (Asking as the thread refers to vivaciti and your case may be nothing to do with them).

had mine in about 2-3 days. Requested over the portal. Moved away to sky

Viviciti - I'd not been posting here since I moved from UKFSN and hadn't updated the .sig

Should take up to 5 working days, can take a little longer under some circumstances but that's rare, but certainly not 22 days, drop us a ticket and we can put a chase on it.
Have you looked in your control panel in case it's sitting in there?

Ticket #794564 if you get a chance to check it out after the holidays...

I have had a look at your ticket and it would seem there is an open order on the BT system, and this is causing the MAC generation to fail.
I have sent an email off today to get whatever open job is showing closed off so we can get a MAC generated but I am afraid I would not hold out much hope of getting this resolved before the end of the holidays.

Thanks, but you might want to take another look at your housekeeping systems, as I got this email over the holidays....

"This is a notification to let you know that we are changing the status of your ticket #794564 to Closed as we have not received a response from you in over 400 hours."

That would be fair enough if it were you waiting for me, but as the last comment was "We are still awaiting the MAC to be generated. Sorry for the wait," you might want to consider if there's a way of your being able to comment to a ticket without toggling the ticket system to expect a user response, if you see what I mean...