Yes, they’re at it yet again and it’s getting really tiresome.

And what’s worse is that these fecktards can’t even operate their phone system properly, constantly hanging up or dropping calls.

“1&1 Accounts: The Home of Special Needs”

I live in London, so not exactly rural or out of the way, and my telephone line is a BT line. BT suggest – via their website – that I can get up to 2Mb download speeds but nothing greater than that. And of course the actual truth, as confirmed to me today by my present broadband providers, O2, is that:

“We’ve estimated that your maximum download speed is 0.5 meg. This is based on information BT gave us about your BT line. The reason why you can’t get better speed is because of the distance between your home and your local exchange which is about 5930 meters.

So, there’s nothing that we can do in this instance. At the best you can realistically hope for speed up to 1Mb download speed. Therefore, we’re unable to provide you with better speed.”

Great, eh?

1. Are not due for renewal anyway; and
2. Were transferred away to a different host ages ago – see this link for proof.

Maybe it’s time to get trading standards involved? I had to threaten to report them to the police for fraud before they’d credit me last time they tried this.

The trouble is, they’ve also billed me for renewing a domain name that they haven’t actually renewed and aren’t likely to renew: I transferred morrisclients.com away a while ago to a different hosting company and this year decided not to renew it. If you do a WHOIS lookup, you’ll see that the domain name is controlled by DreamHost and expired on 11 October 2009.

So despite these facts, 1&1 are billing me for the domain renewal and refuse to accept they’ve done wrong by doing so. In a conversation with Eshan Azim in 1&1′s billing department, he repeatedly told me that they had indeed renewed the domain name. He lied. I asked him whether the call had been recorded and he told me it had, so they can show that I at least am not lying.

So no, 1&1 aren’t issuing a credit note for these services they’re not providing and indeed have no intention of doing so.

I am now in the process of transferring away all of the hundreds of domains I host with them now and closing down my hosting accounts. This will cost them hundreds of pounds a year.

Good call 1&1!

My Vodafone usage has started to come up again since I started using the webcam so I decided to give O2 one final chance to redeem themselves. So I called O2 on Friday last week and a helpful guy called Mike said he’d try again and ring me back when it was resolved, which he did an hour later.

He then took me through things and the line check sadly came back as a tad pathetic, but nevertheless they could do me a service at £7.50 a month subject only to a fair usage cap which is fine. So the other was placed as an existing O2 customer using one of my kids’ O2 mobiles as the customer details – so Jack presently gets order status updates texted through to him.

I am told the line should be active by the end of the week – at which time I’ll be able to see what sort of speed they can deliver – and my wireless router should arrive at the office here tomorrow. The speed is not what I wanted as they don’t have the exchange unbundled yet and no fibre optics in place, but we’ll see.

{sigh}

Of course, if I visit the Be Broadband website it says I can get ADSL2+ and would I like to place an order?

Left hand, meet right hand…

Anyway, O2 have no record of my telephone calls – excellent stuff, O2… – but Claire has promised to ring me back within 5 working days. We’ll see.

It soon became apparent that my bundled call minutes would be insufficient for calling home regularly of an evening, so I decided to arrange for a landline through BT. This was set up and working on Wednesday this week – well done BT – and gives me free evening and weekend calls as I signed up for a year.

Now I started to have ‘issues’ with the Vodafone mobile broadband: my account gets billed mid-month, so to track usage, I have to use the full version of their software. Vodafone also compress images whether you want to or not but the full version allows you to modify the extent of this, whilst still having them compressed. I also cannot FTP files to webservers without them being cocked-up by Vodafone en route. In addition to this, one important aspect of my use would be to keep in touch with my kids over Windows Live Messenger but this does not work with the full version of the software.

The alternative is to use Vodafone’s “Lite” software. The downside with this is that the compression is worse and not adjustable by the user and the software only tracks usage on a month by month basis and not on my billing basis.

So I decided that I would sign up to broadband. BT are overpriced compared with other providers, so I decided on O2. According to their website, broadband is already activated on that line through Be Broadband … who are now part of O2, but because I’m not the customer of record, I would need to contact BT to have the tag removed: O2 blamed BT re-using that number for the cock-up.

After an hour and two dropped calls by BT – same old, same old – I was told there definitely isn’t a tag on that line, but according to their broadband checker:

“For Postcode [telephone number, not Postcode, removed] on Exchange BERMONDSEY

We’ve just tested your line and can confirm your line supports the UK’s most complete broadband package, BT Total Broadband. We estimate your maximum download speed to be 0.5 Mbps (Megabits per second).

Download speeds are dependent on a number of factors, such as the distance between your telephone exchange to your house and how many people are using broadband at the same time so whilst your broadband speed can vary, BT Total Broadband will always give you the maximum download speed available based on these factors.”

…which is frankly pathetic! Entering the postcode instead, I get this:

“For Postcode [removed] on Exchange CANARY WHARF

We’ve just tested your line and can confirm your line supports the UK’s most complete broadband package, BT Total Broadband. We estimate your maximum download speed to be 3.0 Mbps (Megabits per second).

Download speeds are dependent on a number of factors, such as the distance between your telephone exchange to your house and how many people are using broadband at the same time so whilst your broadband speed can vary, BT Total Broadband will always give you the maximum download speed available based on these factors.”

So it seems something is wrong somewhere!

Anyway, when I went through to O2 to place an order, entering the telephone number tells me this:

“Be broadband is currently activated on this BT landline number. Because Be is part of O2, you can move to O2 Broadband without any penalty and without giving Be your usual three month notice of cancellation. You’ll need to get a MAC key from Be before we can take your order though. So please raise a ticket through Be’s member centre (http://www.bethere.co.uk/memberhome.do), or give them a call on 0808 234 8566.”

It clearly isn’t, and that number seems constantly engaged. Ringing O2, they told me it definitely was so there must be a tag still on that number and that due to Data Protection Act issues, I would have to contact BT to get it removed.

So here I am: there isn’t or there is a tag on the line, which is either in Bermondsey or Canary Wharf neither of which will support anything much by way of line speed and which may or may not be in O2′s “Broadband” area – which is actually ADSL2+ – and may or may not be in O2′s “Home Broadband” area which is slower and more expensive.

{sigh} Wouldn’t it be good to get the right answer to the question first time?

All the websites we host with them that rely on databases to function are down. Their new premium rate customer services number allows you to call them, start racking up the charges and then after being put on hold they tell you that all their advisers are busy, goodbye and insist you hang up.

Nice little earner for them, eh?

I first noticed this when my e-mail server wasn’t apparently responding – we have the SMTP e-mail service so all e-mail for a domain name is pushed to this server – and when I checked on Demon’s network status page, nothing untoward was reported.

So I waited for a while in preference to banging my head against a wall, also known as ringing the non-UK technical support [sic] call centre. Since Demon was taken over a few years back and the first line support out-sourced or otherwise transferred abroad, ringing them has been a complete waste of time as they Don’t Have A Fucking Clue which, coupled with a Cannot Be Arsed attitude, adds up to more annoyance for the poor customer.

In my case, we’re being billed incorrectly still – the wrong rate and the wrong name – which is why our bills are almost double what they should be (and there’s the small matter of a one-off charge for £700 recently…) despite two phone calls recently and a letter earlier in the year. Yes, a letter. To an Internet Services Provider. And to cap it all, I recently received two letters with identical content from them on the same day both saying “as you have not been in touch…”.

Pathetic!

It’s just as well the broadband product itself is pretty good, though at £40+VAT (or £69+VAT as they haven’t managed to sort out the billing yet) per month, it bloody well should be good. And yes, our 20:1 contended, 8Mbps service is actually only performing at around 2500kbps but hey…

So anyway. Back to Boxing Day. I eventually decided to ring them and chose the option for the automated status line which was a good call as only then did I discover that yes, they were having a complete DNS failure, which was eventually resolved very late on.

So what does their Network Status Message of the Day have to say about it? Nothing. It’s as though it had never happened!

A quick check first that there were no remaining domain names to worry about with that e-mail address following the debacle with a simple transfer request, so I tried logging into the Soho Control Panel:

STATUS MESSAGE

Although your username and password were found on the system, your account has been suspended.

If you feel there has been some mistake, please contact our support department.

supp...@sohosupport.info

Bless them…