July 27th 2010: Until recently, apart from the occasional lapses, admittedly some quite serious, I have had no reason to complain about Extend Broadband’s service. I had taken up the offer from Gwyn at Arriva Ltd to allow them to become an intermediary between myself and Extend and this has up until recently worked extremely well. Not only does Gwyn come to me to collect payment but a call to her usually results in a quick resolution of the problem. That was until this month.
The CTA fiasco meant that payment would be a few days later than expected but an email exchange with Gwyn established that a payment would be made on my behalf and I would pay her back on my arrival in Cyprus. It was of course disappointing to discover that my internet connection had been cut off when I arrived but a few days later, on 15th July, the service was reconnected and Gwyn said she would collect the outstanding payment on the 16th. Unfortunately, the 1 megabit service we were about to pay for had dropped to 512 kbits. I complained several times and Gwyn phoned and emailed Extend for the original speed to be restored but without any luck. In the end we paid for July on the basis of a 512kb service and the next 3 months in advance at 1 Mb. I then discovered that my neighbour’s 1 Mb service had also dropped to 512 kb and on top of that they told me that Extend had refused to refund them for the 31 days they’d had no service at all.
During a phone call to Extend, when I told the helpdesk I was writing an article for NCFP about this failure in service, I established that their database had a problem and all accounts had reverted to 512kb. I was then asked to drive to Girne with a receipt proving I had paid for a 1 Mb service. I declined the offer and contacted Gwyn who confirmed the database had failed and she informed me that she had emailed Extend with a list of her 1Mb customers, including myself and my neighbour, and had received an email telling her that the database had been corrected. At 9:20am today, she then said that she would contact Extend yet again and try to sort the problem out. Two hours later there is no change so I decided to publish this article.
15:00 – looks like Extend helpdesk got it wrong, after talking to people with far more knowledge than the person I was put through to at Extend it appears that the customer database problem was sorted out quite quickly some time ago and that there is a localised problem affecting myself and a neighbour, which Extend were not aware of, despite being emailed about it several times. I have been promised a solution in the near future. Unfortunately I’m only getting 256kb at the moment.
19:00 – email from Extend
To: Webmaster From: Extend [email protected] Message: Good Afternoon, Please can you remove this recent article and our extend logo off your site as this is unauthorised and not a true statement as extend does not currently have any database problems this is causing our customer's concern and contacting us for not reason. thank you Extend
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