From: Vincent Cunniffe (vincent at domain beacon.ie)
Date: Wed 05 May 1999 - 12:13:29 IST
Kevin Dunleavy wrote:
>
> Noel.C.Carroll at domain life.friendsfirst.ie wrote:
> > <Noel>
> > I agree there. I tend to only spend about 2 hours online every evening but that
> > usually requires 2 calls as the first connection is bound to drop before an hour
> > is out. It sucks when you're trying to download something. Half the time the
> > line just goes dead even though you're still connected. n TE are rubbish and
> > would seriously want to sort themselves out.
> > </Noel>
>
> Is asking TE to "condition" your telephone line a futile course of
> action? (i.e. Has anyone actually asked them to send an engineer out to
> do this?)
>
> Does TE have any quality of service guarantee? Can you report this as a
> line fault? If so, I think they will remove £20 from your bill if they
> don't fix it within a specified time. (See the telephone directory for
> details.)
I used to work for a company called Assurelink, who managed an
electronic
information exchange network for the 9 major Life insurance companies in
Ireland and many of their brokers.
Sadly, this involved dealing with the nightmare triangle of technically
clueless brokers, modems, and Telecom Eireann. During my 1.5 years of
working with the company, I met precisely 1 TE engineer with whom I
had an intelligent conversation regarding modem line-quality.
While I am not saying that all TE engineers are idiots, I am saying that
a large and presumably representative sample that I dealt with hadn't
a damn clue when it came to data issues over what they basically
regarded
as voice lines.
In one case, we called a service engineer out to the same house 5 times,
because they kept saying it was fixed, and we kept telling them that it
wasn't. As above, only one engineer that I ever came across had
equipment
to go out to a site, inspect the equipment and perform bit-error testing
to a reference number (he had a psion sitting on a shelf in the exchange
building :-)
The vast majority of engineers go out to the house, make sure squirrels
haven't eaten your phone, tighten a couple of wires, polish it a bit,
and
say that yer all right now, guv. As long as they can hear a voice over
it
and the meter reads 50.0 volts ring tone, it works as far as they're
concerned.
Telecom. Eireaan. Suck. Big. Time.
Vin
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