Vodafone - The Nation’s Notwork!

cannugec5

Our final outage lasted over 7 days, finally being fixed on Wednesday the 18th. The fault lay in the ‘box’ at the end of the street, where we were plugged in to a dead port. The engineer came to the house to reset the router and just check it had reconnected. He said in his terms it was a very simple fix. 

The previous Wednesday I had the OpenReach text advising that an engineer was on his way, dealing with the issue, then resolved it. But we were still off. Having been given the engineers name and mobile number I called him. He was working on a job in London. I’m in Scotland. Clearly a simple error that I was sent the wrong details, but nobody fixed us and I had to phone them yet again. 

Apparently for some unknown reason we are not entitled to any compensation. I haven’t been able to ascertain exactly why, but suspect that it’s a small print get out clause to do with remote and rural areas. ( Our Open Reach appointments have been in a Wednesday every time so I suspect they are thin on the ground and unable to offer the two working day promise).

Important thing for us is that we are reconnected in time for Christmas. It was a great hardship that I/we had to go to the local pub to use their Wi-Fi to order my Christmas groceries and other online shopping gifts! 

I didn’t realise how much I’d miss the internet - not least this forum. It was ironic that when I was reconnected I had missed a YouGov chat about how one would cope without the internet. I’d been unable to contribute to the discussion ! 

My final phone call with Vodafone was classic. The previous one I’d done from a friends house, but the CS rep said that made it very difficult - need to ‘check’ things etc. So this time I was patient and called on the intermittent one bar of signal. First CS rep got cut off fairly quickly. I tried again a little later. This time I started by saying I’d been cut off from the previous rep. So this lady very helpfully offered to call me back if the call cut off. It took her calling me back 6 times to complete the conversation and set up the appointment that actually fixed the problem.