COMS don't answer tickets

Here is a link to a screenshot of the COMS ticket system for my account.

You can see that tickets one week old have not been opened and that bumped tickets from December 2014 remain ignored.

COMS invoiced and Direct Debited me in January 2015 for services that ended in December 2014.

Draw you own conclusions about COMS.


https://imageshack.com/i/exxUxXg4p

Ring them?

Trying that today.

Someone in customer services answered, transferred me to billing and I got cut off after 7 minutes on hold.

In reply to a post by ComsUser:

Trying that today.

Someone in customer services answered, transferred me to billing and I got cut off after 7 minutes on hold.

In a situation like this just contact your bank and get them to refund the money under the Direct Debit guarantee.

In reply to a post by Amjad:

In reply to a post by ComsUser:

Trying that today.

Someone in customer services answered, transferred me to billing and I got cut off after 7 minutes on hold.

In a situation like this just contact your bank and get them to refund the money under the Direct Debit guarantee.

Totally agree with that. However a better move would to migrate from COMS to another ISP of your choice.
COMS are proving themselves to be a total disaster

In reply to a post by DooGie:

... However a better move would to migrate from COMS to another ISP of your choice.
COMS are proving themselves to be a total disaster

[cough]
Have you read the OP?

In reply to a post by ComsUser:

COMS invoiced and Direct Debited me in January 2015 for services that ended in December 2014.

I left in November last year and they are still invoicing me, but fortunately I stayed with manual card payments so they can't actually grab any money. Coms may just be the worst ISP ever.

In reply to a post by Amjad:

In reply to a post by ComsUser:

Trying that today.

Someone in customer services answered, transferred me to billing and I got cut off after 7 minutes on hold.

In a situation like this just contact your bank and get them to refund the money under the Direct Debit guarantee.

Completely agree with that.

I think most people don't realise how simple it is to do this and it's no hassle. Claim back your DD fees from the very date you started paying Coms and trust me they will then take notice of you, you are perfectly entitled to do that too. Empower yourself against their dire customer service and stop being a victim.

Once they sort the situation out then it is then up to you to then repay them any monies that are owing if you so wish. i.e. YOU are in the driving seat.

And Coms have lived down to my expectations.

Got a reply to my ticket asking them to stop billing me; they claim my connection was not migrated to another ISP (it was) and thus they will not issue a 'credit on the outstanding invoices'. This despite me warning them of the date of the migration and notifying them afterwards that it had occurred.

(my understanding of the legal position is that with a monthly contract once I've notified an ISP that I no longer require service from them I'm not liable for any recurring charges beyond one month from that date?)

If you have the ticket numbers (should be in your account area under closed or something) showing that you gave 1 months notice, then send them that

Correct, once you have given them the required notice and as long as you had migrated away within that notice period.
Are they saying your line is "still" with them? if so ask them to do a TAG's lookup and ask them for the results. this will tell them who the line is with.
Where it is a little harder for them to work out was say if they provided your line through TTB and you moved it to another provider that also run the line over TTB then the TAG would remain unchanged, if that's the case ask your new provider for a conformation of when you moved to them and send that to coms, if you say moved to BT retail then the TAG will clearly show.

is "im migrating to a new ISP" the same as "i give 30 days notice from x date"?

Going on what DrBC said he informed them of migration, would that also be classed as starting the 30 day notice period or have you explicitly got to say "i give 30 days notice from x date"

I know it means the same thing but maybe the wording of it is what the issue is. COMs dont take much confusing it would seem

Edited by bobble_bob (Thu 22-Jan-15 14:43:36)

I'm having the same problem with Coms not answering tickets.

I changed one of my two accounts with them to plusnet 2/3 months ago and after a speedy response to my request for the MAC address (hurray), I asked to cancel one of the two accounts due to their throttling of streaming video. Coms took about a week to reply and I was told I'd get a refund off my next bill.

Roll around next bill and they owe me £10.98, great thinks I. Except the refund doesn't happen. As I've been busy with other things I didn't bother chasing it except around the middle of this month I start getting the connection intermittenly blocked due to a 'missed payment' - yes thats right - the missed payment is them not paying me my refund!

Cue two tickets which now haven't been replied to after 23 days!!!! Interesting I can see it was 'updated' a few days ago with nothing having happened.

I don't see why I should ring them which for me isn't as convenient and they are an ISP!

Remember when they said service would stay the same after the transfer from ADSL24? ha! Interestingly after I cancelled one line, the video throttling mysteriously dissapeared. As soon as I switched from Coms to plusnet too, the throttling immediately dissapeared. This was after months of [censored] youtube performance.

Sorry for the ranty post!

I am also having the same problem with Coms - well, I am still being invoiced for service despite migrating my fibre broadband away from them. I got my MAC code in early December and told them I was leaving and migrated to zen in mid-December, but since then I have received two further invoices. I even called them again, once I initiated the zen migration, to confirm I needed to take no further action, but they have continued to invoice me. I've asked them to investigate so I expect there will be a resolution this week (or next ....). Fortunately I had cancelled my coms direct debit on advice from zen so I don't have to chase them for money.

After giving Coms chance after chance time and time again, I've finally given up and moving over to Plusnet.

In the last 14 Months since migrating from ADSL24 I've barely had 5 Months of reliable internet.

I've booked numerous days off work (10 days in the last 11 Months to be exact) for BT/Openreach engineer appointments and when they don't turn up I ring Coms to get told "oh, it was cancelled as your connection is back up". Unfortunately they can't seem to grasp that this is what happens with an "intermittent" connection!

Due to the tickets constantly being closed or ignored the Coms technician asked me to communicate with him by email, which I did. When I emailed asking for a refund of the last 3 Months where I've had no internet connection I got no reply.

Emailed again asking the same question with the caveat that I'm considering moving elsewhere - still no reply.

Raised a ticket to request MAC code - Still no reply.

After 2 Weeks and no MAC code I asked for it again. 3 days later a reply came stating they couldn't give me the MAC code as they can't get it from the supplier therefore I'd have to ask my new ISP for a "Working Line take-over".

Plusnet were happy with that.... and the migration is taking place right now.

By the way - I wrote this post 20 minutes ago - been waiting for connection to come back up so I can actually post it!

So you are now on Plusnet?

As we don't know what the cause of your problem was it's hard to forecast how things will go. At least you will get better CS from them, though if it isn't a simple issue then you will need to get the forum reps involved.

I'm sorry to say that there seems to have been a policy decision from above a few months ago that the reps can still check here, but nothing like as frequently as they used to. The heavy hand of an ex-BT man at the top in my opinion.

When they do look in they are just as effective as ever, but I would recommend going on the Community forums for a faster response. That doesn't mean you can't post over here what you think - as I rarely go there I hope you do. Just shout for help over there.

I think the "working line takeover" would be because you were on full LLU with them. MACs are not used to migrate into or out of that.

Welcome, and good luck with the fault .

Lately I've become convinced there is no fault with the line but the problems are Coms/equipment related.

One day upstream SNR will suddenly creep up from its normal 8 to around 28 whilst downstream SNR doesn't move.
The next day I'll have 40% packet loss, but the day after that its fine again.

Then I'll have no connection for 3 or 4 days, but suddenly it comes back and works fine for a fortnight.

Once downstream SNR goes below 4, it will keep dropping until it goes into negative numbers then the connection will keep dropping, then re-connecting at 4dB, then drop back into negative, disconnect, and the cycle continues.

I'll contact Coms who'll put me on a historic profile and downstream SNR goes back to 8 or 9 and stays there and is fine for a while.

All these issues happen independently of each other, but at all times one of them is causing connectivity problems.

At 54dB my line attenuation is on the high side, thus the line seems sensitive to these various fluctuations in other parameters.

Then I'll get "connection drops" yet the router stays syncing throughout, but there's no internet connectivity.

I'll get a few days with every website returning DNS errors, but I can download emails or run programs that stream data with no problems.

The only fault that's ever been found on the line by BT was high resistance at the DP due to corrosion and that was fixed, but the problems still keep occurring.


You are correct - I'm on full LLU (Talk Talk equipment). I once said I'd never take broadband with Talk Talk due to rude customer service I once received, so by dumping Coms I'm getting rid of any reliance on them too - 2 birds with one stone.

Edited by deleted (Thu 29-Jan-15 08:22:15)

I read "the migration is taking place now" to mean you were posting some other way while your line was disconnected and reconnected .

When is your expected migration date?

Migration date should be around 10 working days from today.

They estimated 30 minutes to 1 hour downtime.

My only concern is what kind of hit I'll take on broadband speeds. Through LLU on ADSL2+ I can get up to around 7Mbps sync rate and 6Mpbs actual speed. 0.8Mbps upstream.

Prior to being on LLU I struggled to get beyond 2Mbps downstream.

Which exchange?

Just a note in case it helps anyone else, I replied to my own Coms support ticket and it changed to 'in progress'. I then got a reply from a Coms person first thing the next day. They say there was a glitch in the ticket system, but if thats the case you'd hope that someone had thought it had gone a bit quiet on the support ticket front as of late!

Will see if they manage to resolve my billing issue...

I switched one of my lines to plusnet and have had no problems with them. Seem to be about as good as ADSL24 used to be. I know they do manage traffic a bit, but at least it isn't as heavy handed as Coms where they made youtube practically unusable half the time - even in the early hours of the morning...

Crayford

You shouldn't have any technical problem on that exchange wrt the speed these days. It's possible that when you were last on a BT Wholesale connection there was a fault on an exchange line card.

If the estimate for your line from the BT Wholesale checker is below 8Mbps here is a possibility Plusnet may configure you on ADSL rather than ADSL2+. That would need sorting out as it would possibly slightly lower your downstream and would certainly clobber the upstream to 448kbps.

Also I don't know if they have stopped doing this yet, but for a long time they provisioned ADSL2+ with a 448kbps upstream, but uncapped it on request. Wait and see on that I think, or register on the Community forums and ask if it is still the case. If it is, ask one of the reps there to get it right from Day 1 .

Thanks for the helpful info Robertos - and apologies to others for hijacking the thread.

Upload is currently between zero and 100kpbs as for the last 48 hours the upload SNR has got stuck at 28.8dB again. But when SNR is reasonable I do get 0.8Mbps suggesting its not capped at 448kbps.

Estimated download speeds for my line are 3.5Mbps (between 2Mbps and 6Mbps) but I know a reliable 7Mbps is possible. To get 7Mbps I have to be on a 12Mbps? (I think) profile rather than a 24Mbps profile which messes things up. (according to Coms technical people).

By the sounds of it Plusnet are much more approachable than Coms, and according to the sales people they'd be happy to work with me to deliver the best speeds and reliability they can.

Well Coms haven't fully sorted my billing issue and yet again the account was blocked until their systems registered my Direct Debit going through....

And unfortunately they appear to be back to ignoring tickets again. As I logged a new request and then replied to my own ticket in a similar fashion as to last time, I think we can conlude one of two things:

1) Their ticket system is horribly broken and they haven't yet bothered to fix it.
2) They ignore tickets.

I can feel another MAC request coming on...

I cancelled my Coms direct debit as I'm migrating elsewhere which leaves me owing them February's payment (due 1st Feb).

As my connection is down more than it is up and when up its often only a up for a few minutes before disconnecting again so I raised a ticket on 1st Feb asking them to fix my connection so I could stay online long enough to log in and make February's payment.

Ticket closed with no response!

My exact message was as follows:


Whilst I am going to migrate to a new ISP, I feel that it is only fair I should be able to access the internet whilst paying for Coms broadband. My intention is to pay February's payment by card, but at this rate I can't get a connection to last long enough to even log in and make the payment. (Even this entire message is copy and pasted from Word so I can quickly send it when the connection comes back up otherwise by the time I've typed it the connection has dropped again).


I just hope this doesn't adversely affect my forthcoming migration.

I created a ticket in regards to a billing issue on the 29th of Jannuary.

As of today there has not been a reply.

I'll be leaving this useless ISP as soon as my next job and relocation is sorted.