Ripples on the brain

If you do not have the time to read the whole post, then here is the message: “If you want to have a good internet browsing experience, do not buy Hathway’s broadband connection“. The travails that I have gone through over the last 4 months or so have not ceased at all and I have no hopes of me having a better experience in the near future.

First of all, I don’t find their 256 kbps fast enough. The download speeds are pretty low most of the time and comparable to that of a dial up connection. I agree that it was not like this always. It was pretty fast in the beginning but has progressively become slower and slower to such an extent that I can no longer watch anything in youtube without waiting for like half an hour for a 1 minute video.

Secondly, their connection goes off every now and then. When I got a 3 month connection for the first time, I didn’t have a problem for a month. Then there was a problem every weekend (exactly on a Saturday morning every time!). Now after I recently extended it for 3 more months (I couldn’t help since I didn’t check the other services when the first package expired) and have been swamped with problems almost everyday from then on. In fact, nowadays I make more calls to their customer service than the calls I made when I used a dial up connection for accessing the internet.

But the thing that Hathway should be most ashamed of is their customer service. Anytime you call them (and get through to them after 15 minutes of busy tone on an average), they ask you for your customer number and take the next 5 minutes trying to locate your name. Then you ask them if there is a problem with their connection. The answer is always a grand “No”. When you mention that you are having a problem, they take their own sweet time and respond that they have identified the problem to be signal/cable/power/connection issues. You wouldn’t believe, but it is always one of these 4, as if they were responding to an illiterate guy! “The engineers are already working on it”, they say (”how”, you might ask as they claimed only sometime ago that there was no problem). For any problem, the resolution time is always 2 hours. You get disgusted after calling them daily and ask them to connect to the person who’s working on the problem. The answer is always, “That is not possible”. The problem invariably takes a longer time to resolve.

Once I called the customer service on a Saturday morning and continued to call them every 2 hours to remind them about the problem. The “network engineer” finally appeared at my door at 5 in the evening, a good 9 hours after I’d made the first call and identified a cable problem which was corrected within seconds. When queried as to why it look such a long time for him to come, he replied that he’d been informed only minutes ago! I’m disgusted because the CSR’s can neither identify the problem, nor can they communicate it either to the customer or to their own colleagues. Moreover, the organization doesn’t have an escalation procedure. If you have a problem with their service, you can only report to them. Their superiors neither have a number, nor a mail id.

In fact, that is the reason I am airing my grievance in my blog. I went through a lot of trouble especially last week trying to get an important presentation to office. I have made up my mind to just wait for this package to end. I might go for a BSNL connection which seemed to be good when I tried last week.