Maintenance!

[dcclanuk]

ok guys, I live in HA0, and at 12:00 today the internet stopped working. I called TS at about 12.30, and was told its not an area fault, and an engineer was booked for wednesday. Called up next door neighbour, his internet wasnt working either.

From TS he got the same reply, and was booked an engineer for the same time. He called his mate also living in my area, and he also had that prob, so my neighbour called back to say it must be an area fault, but TS was refusing to accept. After a while they accepted and said there was an area fault in HA0???

Gave an estimate of 6pm to be fixed, and said it was "Maintenance" taking place. The broadband was fixed around 6.30pm, but I have a few questions:
1. Why did TS refuse to accept its an area fault?
2. Why have maintenance during the day when there seems to be no obvious/urgent problems? [They could have informed us atleast!]
3. Does this maintenance mean that I will put on the 20mb trial? [i chked config file, and its still on 10mb!]

edit:
4. Why doesnt this maintenance show up on the ntl service status page?

[Jon T]

This happened to me last month, our phones(and internet) kept going off, rang up technical support, who I knew damn well had been called by at least 4 neighbours from my road. Anyway, the guy on the other end of the phone couldn't have been any more arrogant and self important if he tried. Told him it was a fault affecting the whole street, he refused to accept it and assured me that everyone else's phone of my street were working fine(i knew this to be wrong). Kept trying to send an engineer round to me, to top it all off he raised his voice and tried to talk over the top of me, so I politely said goodbye and put the phone down when he was in mid-sentance.

Anyway, rang again the next day(phone on street still off), and got put through to a very helpfull lady in Swansea, she told me that even several customers phone up from the same area with the same fault that there is no automatic system of flagging up a possible are fault, and TS operatives have no way of looking manually to see if anyone else has phoned inthe same fault.

That was the first time I had to contact NTL for the best part of 4 years, and based on my last experience I hope it's at least another 4 before I have to contact them again.

[bigcat]

Originally Posted by Jon T

TS operatives have no way of looking manually to see if anyone else has phoned inthe same fault.

What a complete an utter load of garbage!

I've worked in Network Surveillance for over 2 1/2 years, well until 17/11/06 when the whole department has been made redundant and the jobs have been transferred to the Telewest Outage Team...who to say the least are doing a VERY poor job of it at the moment.

The work has been shipped out to Telewest gradually over the last 4 weeks, so the amount of Network Outages being spotted HAS dropped dramatically(not sour grapes on my part, this IS based on fact)

Anyway, back on track, when a Network Outage has been spotted it should be added to something called a Pop Up (an intraweb based page that can be accessed by Faults & BB Support listing ALL Network Outages), and the system also adds it to something called a Faults Profiler (which again Faults & BB Support have access to)

I wont go into much more detail, but from a customers account, no matter what billing system they're on, ICMS, Harmony or SMS its very easy to find which cab the customer is served by, then it takes literally seconds to search the Pop Up to see if that cab is affected by an Area Fault.

Now, as for Network Maintenance this is a neccessity to keep the network up & running as parts do wear out in the cabs. This normally takes place between 8am - 4pm in most parts of the country except London. In London it takes place between 8am - 6pm.

Again, this is available for all to see on the Pop Up. When the Net Tech rings in to activate his maintenance ticket it's automatically added to the Pop Up, then automatically removed at 4pm/6pm.

I'm not casting aspertions..but, I'm dreading becoming a paying customer because I know how inefficient some of the staff in fault/BB Support are..