June 28, 2004

New broadband provider?

Pipex was down yesterday afternoon - ccording to the official sources, there was a major network failure which affected dialup and adsl connections in the uk from 11am until late sunday afternoon. In my experience the failure was about 6pm on Saturday night and lasted until about 4pm on Sunday. When I discovered it on Sunday afternoon I tried to ring the helpdesk but got a busy tone all the time. Eventually I found another number and got through to a recording which told me the support line was closed (so why the engaged tone?) and that they only cover weekdays and part of Saturday - not impressed. Eventually I managed to get to the status page which took forever on a 9600 modem to find it was this major network outage. Not even their alternative free dialup would have been any good as this would also have been affected. So the fact that a major network component failed, no alternative and a closed support desk, slow status page means i'm looking for an alternative.
Whilst in the office hall this morning I spotted a flyer for ezeconnect broadband provided by Kleeneze of all people. This is the company that sells cleaning products through catalogues shoved through the postbox. Just what could they possibly know about broadband? On closer investigation I think its just a rebadged plus.net reseller with the same prices as plusnet (and same package names!) but they get commission (and you get commission if you refer someone else). I'm just stunned at the sheer weirdness of reselling broadband.
However, if I was going to resell broadband, then I'd make sure that at least one link on my homepage at eze-connect.com would work before starting to advertise the service. Instead all their links point to the the main page - oops!

Posted by Andy at June 28, 2004 1:02 PM
Comments

Maybe we should start a UK bloogers broadband reseller? ;)

We had prolems with pipex in the past where we payed vast sums of money for a diversely routed leased line which involved one line going from Kensington to Docklands via West London and the other going via North London. What they didnt tell us was that both lines terminated in the same rack at Telehouse. Said rack caught fire, we lost our connection for 2 days and they got muchas earbenderos from our IT director. Strangely, they were much more helpful from then on ;)

Posted by: Adam Field at June 28, 2004 3:20 PM