Personal experience with ISP's.

[Suenneil]

Originally Posted by Expat Ben

I've heard it said they employ numpties so they can pay them numpty wages, more often than not without an employment contract, zero holidays, no NI payments - the numpties do the job, get paid poorly, are not trained up to do the job and have mor or less zero rights.

It's not the numpties I blame, it's the government for allowing companies to abuse numpties. I think it's fair to that even

should have some rights

I like that word Ben ... lol ... its very descriptive yet has a childlike quality to it!

But you expressed yourself very well!

Sue x

[Caz.I]

Originally Posted by Xose

Does anyone out there have service experience, good or bad, of the following ISP's?

ONO
Jazztel
Ya
Tele2.

My location dictates that all of them would have to use Telefonica's infrustructure to provide a service directly to my home. They would therefore be limited to offering me speeds that the Telefonica switch availability permits. As such, I am purely looking for Customer Service experience and server/hub reliability, continuity of service, account stability etc.

Basically, if you experience no probs or loads of down time and a useless helpdesk. Specially interested in anyone who's had a nightmare trying to stop a contract with any of these, after the minimum contract time of course.

Many thanks to anyone who can share their experience with me before I make a bad choice that I know can be very painful if gotten wrong.

Xose

Well, Xose, I dont know about good customer service, unfortunately, certainly not from any of the above.

I had similar problems with ya.com in that I tried to change from Telefonica to them and after 8 weeks of waiting I gave up and cancelled before I even got connected.

Then I went for Tele 2 and i had problems with the connection because there was something wrong with my telephone line (because a neighbour who is a computer whizz found out for me) but they wouldnt believe me and I made about 10 phone calls to their helpdesk before they agreed to send out an engineer who discovered there was a problem with the line. (And that wasnt until after I lost it and got a bit hysterical!)

However, having finally been connected, I couldnt face the trauma of moving again so am still with them. Though since the end of August have been trying to upgrade the speed to get a cheaper deal, and still waiting, so I may change but not really keen to.

Heard Jazztel are ok but not sure, and was thinking if I do change I might try them. Tho I have heard one bad story about them too and about ONO too.

I really dont want to change back to Telefonica out of principle, and also because before it seemed to be ridiculously expensive with hidden charges - never seemed to be less than 85e/month even with few calls. So I am saving a little more than I did before. Telefonica keep ringing up with offers to go back to them, but I keep refusing because i dont want the hassle of changing and I dont want them to have a virtual monopoly either.

Hope you make the right decision, its a tough one!

Caz.

[Xose]

Originally Posted by Hombre

Customer Service over here is almost medieval...they have a long way to go. We are from the CS sector and it pains us daily to be on the receiving end of grossly inefficient staff of all ages. Slowly...we feel they are getting there in some areas , but, by god it's slow!!

I agree Hombre, the bad news is that the price we pay for no traffic jams and large queues is bad CS - IMHO. Bottom line, no one's going to put in major CS systems and procedures when the client base is as small as it is in the majority of areas in Spain. On the other hand, when it comes to corporate CS, there's ITIL being introduced all over the majors and TF have a CS second to none when dealing with corporate accounts. I dealt with them from the UK for some problems our commercial guys were having in Murcia (in another life) and they were hot. It may have been because they were talking to people "inside" the industry and so "Have you tried re-booting" wouldn't really do it but I have to say they were quick of the mark and got it sorted fast.

I live in an ayuntamiento of less than 8000 people over a large area. I'm 2Km from the nearest switch. I'm not holding my breath for ADSL2 capacity to be available to me any day soon. So, I'll just keep on searching for the supplier who, using the TF lines, will give me the best deal for what TF say they can provide - currently 1Mb and 256Kb up + calls. The good news is that they don't have a monthly limit before you go down to 256Kb down. TF do... so no TF for me unless I can't possibly avoid them.

Xose

[Xose]

Originally Posted by Caz.I

....
Hope you make the right decision, its a tough one!

Caz.

Thanks for the heads up on Tele2 Caz. I was thinking they might well be the ones to finally go with as they have a pretty good price/performance deal compared with TF. But as I said, I'm stuck with the TF line as none of the suppliers mentioned have their own infrustructure in this neck of the woods. Given that Tele2 don't seem to be able to offer the basics as you mentioned with a Telephone line, I won't trust them to deal with TF if the problem (real or not) were at the TF switch for example. Clearly they're not for me then. Oh dear, starting to look like hobson's choice.

TF, the kind of public end user company where good is bad and bad is about as good as you can possibly wish to get.

Xose

[Xose]

Originally Posted by Expat Ben

I've heard it said they employ numpties so they can pay them numpty wages, more often than not without an employment contract, zero holidays, no NI payments - the numpties do the job, get paid poorly, are not trained up to do the job and have mor or less zero rights.

It's not the numpties I blame, it's the government for allowing companies to abuse numpties. I think it's fair to that even numpties should have some rights

Interesting Expat Ben, I've heard quite a different story.

The country can't place the huge numbers of Licenciados and Formacion Professional Grado Superior people they have as there are a gazillion - and so these people end up in Helpdesks with Degrees in Software Engineering and the like. They are massively over qualified, massively bored and think the average end users that calls them from home, are numpties.

Oh, and they are also under paid, zero employment rights on their temp contract and undervalued as for everyone that leaves, there are 100 wanting their job.

I too blame the government for allowing the skills/jobs balance to go to hell in a big way and making zero to no effort in diversifying Spain's backbone industry beyond construction.... though now, I believe they are having a bit of a rethink

[Suenneil]

Just read this small piece in Spanish business news - Telefonica now able to provide ADSL but without customers having to subscribe to an actual telephone line (well the ability to use the line for talking on it anyway! lol)

Thing is its still over 30 euros a month for 3mb which is darned expensive in comparison to some others, and why oh why is ADSL in Spain so much more expensive than other EU Countries ???

Sue x

Spain Business Brief - Thursday October 22 2009

[libove]

My experience with the original deployment of ADSL and of competitive ADSL companies in the US exactly matches my experience in Barcelona with ONO (as a reseller of Telefonica phone wires for ADSL service):

If the only option where you live is ADSL provided over Telefonica wires, no matter from whom you buy it, you would be best to deal directly with Telefonica.

Why? Because Telefonia will give no service to the competitive ADSL companies (ONO, Ya, Vodafone, any of them), as the regulation of the enforced competition between the incumbent / legacy phone company (Telefonica) and its mandated customers (ONO, Ya, Vodafone, ...) is insufficient, and of course it is in Telefonica's interest to make its competitors' service less technically good than its own.

As a result, if (when) you do have a line problem which impacts your ADSL service (such as the big winds here in Catalunya in January 2009), Telefonica will only do anything for your competitive ADSL provider if the line has totally stopped working. If the speed simply has fallen due to degradation, say from a nick in the insulation of a line somewhere which has let in water, they won't do anything, and your competitive ADSL company actually can't do anything about it.

I've been through this personally here in Barcelona, where my ONO-marketing Telefonica-line ADSL went wonky in those aforementioned big winds. I ultimately canceled the ONO service because they really couldn't get anything done by Telefonica, was charged an early cancellation fee, disputed it through the Agencia Catalana del Consum and got the penalty fee refunded to me (after about four months).

If, however, you can get Internet service NOT using Telefonica's infrastructure - such as limited areas in Barcelona where ONO has its own fibre network - then you're golden to go with them, though of course customer service will vary and generally is poor here.

Feel free to reply by post or PM or email if you'd like more information about how this technology and regulation (doesn't) work, etc.

Jay Libove
Barcelona

[morlandg]

Originally Posted by Hombre

Last week I averaged 21.60 Mbps. For this I pay €72 per month which includes all calls, national and international, line rental and equipment rental. I'm with Telefonica by the way. I agree they are a bunch of ********s but I don't want to go through the pain of trying to move.

I live in the 'campo' inland from Torre del Mar and use Fobos Telecom for my internet access.
www.fobostelecom.es
http://www.speedtest.net/result/614060634.png

I pay 36+IVA per month. I find it an excellent service.

[XTreme]

Considering my location this isn't too bad.....though upload speed is pretty dire!

[Caz.I]

I am definitely not a technical person so cant discuss ins and outs of the technical side of ADSL, but just to update on my last post about this: I was trying to upgrade to 20mb with Tele2 (who I was with before for ADSL) but didnt want to continue renting the telephone line from Telefonica. So was told it was now possible to do this with Tele2. Really my aim was to save money more than get a good download speed. So wanted to ditch the 22 e per month Telefonica line rental bill. The new deal was 39.90e + IVA per month all in and half price for the first six months.

Finally got the "alta" last week though didnt get sms message that I was supposed to get to tell me this. But suddenly I had no internet and no telephone line. It transpired that to connect to the telephone line with Tele2 I had to install the router, once I did it was up and running on the telepone line. Is this because of VOIP technology, not sure? Anyway, it was a bit trickier to get the internet connection, but I got some help from a neighbour but I had problems at first, I think because Windows settings blocked my connection. I hope I have sorted it.

Did the speed test and not getting anything like 20mb download speed (was 2.98 today)., though read somewhere that in Fuengirola its not possible to get a high speed. No idea why. Although dont think they should really offer what they cant provide, I dont mind too much because of saving in costs - as long as it continues to work, touch wood!

Caz.I