Origin and line faults

My parents have had no broadband since last Thursday. Router tries handshaking, gives up and tries again....

Logged issue with Origin on Friday morning, and they are [censored] around trying to avoid calling out BT. Every day they come up with different excuses and at the last contact, claimed that BT were ignoring Origins calls!

Voice wise, the line is fine. Internally - no extensions, and done all the tests with the engineer socket. Origin even wasted time "re configuring" the router, although we'd tried both the origin supplied Asus unit, and the normal Draytek 2820.

Can you not try telling them if they don�t raise an SFVA task with Openreach your parents will leave ....

How about getting them to contact Watchdog, they seem keen to leap on any story concerning broadband at the moment ....

Not sure if this is related, but looks like Origin are "falling apart".

https://forum.kitz.co.uk/index.php?topic=22789.msg38...

A week later I wound them up on Facebook (was going to do it on Twitter, but that always confuses me!)

Within minutes I had numerous members of their social media team responding. Initially asking really awkward verification questions like "what package did you originally sign up for?". fwiw I am a "approved person" on the account.

Eventually we got through all of that, and they then asked me to test from the master socket. Didn't they even read the ticket notes? Apparently not, so after I reminded them of that, they then almost immediately came back with "an engineer is booked between 0830 and 1300 on Friday 30th".

Great, I said... shame you didn't bother to contact my parents to tell them. Transpires that when my parents last spoke to Origin (the Tuesday), they said "we'll email you when we book an engineer". Well that is pretty useless without working broadband, replied my dad. They then said they'd text him. Needless to say they didn't.

An engineer did turn up on Friday and declared there was an issue, and was testing for noise between each junction on the cable. Eventually they were swapped to a new port in the exchange and the connection has re-established.

I know Origin are cheap, but they do make life significantly more complicated than it needs to be. I suspect they "hoped" the fault would go away...

This does seem the way to make suppliers of all kinds jump these days. I'm not sure in my own mind whether this is a good thing or a bad thing. I've never tried it myself.

If it was the only way to get help from ISPs, might they save on unnecessary phone support and be able to lower their prices? Or would the quality of support on social media drop dramatically as the staff would be redeployed with no extra training?

This was very noticeable on Plusnet years ago. People who weren't getting anywhere with phone calls or tickets got rapid results from the Plusnet forum here and the Plusnet Community forums. The good, smart and savyy support staff were monitoring the public spaces.

First they were effectively banned from saying anything here, and it seems not too long after from even visiting, as this brought stuff into the wider domain of what non-customers who might be considering PN would see. Though non-customers can, or at least could, see their inhouse forums. That isn't such an obvious step for us though.

Then it seems these excellent people got moved around and less reachable, along with other changes to the help systems and the start of responding on social media. That's when I migrated to AAISP. Now experimenting with 4G as per my sig, and probably stay permanently on it and drop landline broadband. Maybe even the landline itself.