ADSL24/COMS renaged on their promise

When I first found out about the sale last year I read the info and then immediately opened a ticket with ADSL24 asking if my IP address would stay the same or change. I have a number of servers locked-down to allow access only from this IP address, and if I was going to have to update everything, inform IT departments etc then I would consider changing supplier. It's a faff and I'd rather not, as no one provides fast ADSL where I live.

Mohamed phoned me - on a Saturday if I remember rightly - to say the directors wished to assure me that there would be no change to my IP address and everything would continue as before. This was then confirmed in a ticket. Reassured, I left everything as-is.

[Aside: I wanted to include a screenshot of the ticket as prof, but the old control panel has gone and - even assuming the tickets have been migrated - my login details don't work on the Coms branded one]

I got a letter from Coms a couple of weeks ago, again saying nothing would change.

So imagine my feelings when this morning I received an email from them telling me I will be migrated on 10 February and what my new IP address is. Feeling "led up the garden path" is the politest way of describing it. "Betrayal of Trust" more accurate. At a time when they most need their customers to trust them, they've blown mine to pieces - and I have referred people to ADSL24 over the 6ish years I've used them. How can I now believe what they say?

I don't have anything constructive to end this with. I have 5 days to figure out which accounts are locked to my IP address (yeah, I should've documented them at the time, lesson learned), get the relevant IT departments to make changes. 5 days is not enough time to migrate elsewhere. Compensation for the time involved? Ha, be nice to at least get a free couple of months, but I suspect that someone somewhere not telling the truth (or the situation changing faster than they can cope with, though given how my original enquiry was handled that doesn't seem likely) will just be seen as one of those things...

Disappointing I agree, but mistakes do happen. Ask NASA. Have you contacted Coms directly about this since receiving notification?

They said in the letter that it wasnt technically possible. I dont know enough about networking, but maybe they had wanted to keep everyone on the same IP, but found it was impossible in the end?

Does not look like it is [technically possible].

They have a /18 from RIPE. They appear to have split this in to two /19s, one for them to move customers to whilst still leaving the old ones active.

Once everyone has moved they might start to re-use the other /19 but it won't be a quick process and you'd have changed your stuff by then anyway.

Matt

I can quite believe it's not technically possible. But they should have known this from the start, when they had a network engineer report on what was needed to merge the two systems, and if they didn't know - said so, not delivered something as 'fact' when it wasn't.

I have through their website, as I can't log in to access the ADSL ticket system. We shall see...