01.15
I called COMREG (the government commissioner for telecommunications in Ireland with authority to penalise a licensed company) immediately after being dismissed by Vodafone Ireland Customer “Care” (Emmet) this morning. COMREG took a listing on my complaints and went through my options, including some very severe steps. I was given a case reference number and instructed to call Customer “Care”. My first lines were to:
- As for the customer care agent’s name
- Inform the person that I was “filing a formal complaint following the instructions of COMREG and that I had a case open with them”. I supplied the COMREG reference number.
I listed my complaints:
- Vodafone fixed line home broadband has a daily outage for every customer in Ireland, including myself. This is due to an unusual design of the DHCP lease process by Vodafone Ireland. Contrary to their claims, this is unusual and I have never had this happen with either BT Ireland nor Digiweb in the past.
- The performance I have experienced of Vodafone Ireland fixed line home broadband has been awful. Any site containing images either takes an age to load or the images fail to load. This causes me issues because (a) most sites have lots of images and (b) I’m into photography. I know the sites in question are fine because they work OK from our data centre.
- I cannot access some sites via Vodafone Ireland fixed line home broadband. I know the sites are operational but I cannot access them. This appears to be random. I know the sites in question are fine because they work OK from our data centre.
- I have tried to open cases with Customer Care on the home broadband issues but the agent couldn’t do anything beyond the 2 steps (reset router, change DNS) and refused to escalate the call.
- I had a crank call last night and I called to get Customer Care to block the number from calling me again. The customer care agent would not cooperate and put me on call to get rid of me. The agent handling this formal complaint, “Peter”, did at least call someone internally to dig up the number that dialled me last night and have it added to my case. That should have been the first action of “Emmet” this morning, instead of saying “Vodafone Ireland does not block numbers”.
It took some time to get all this recorded with “Peter”. I was promised a supervisor call back! Hah, as Emmet told me this morning, those happen if a supervisor feels like it. But I do have a requirement from COMREG: it is the duty of Vodafone Ireland to respond to my complaints in this case within 10 working days or they face penalties from COMREG.
COMREG have also offered a way to smoothly transition from Vodafone Ireland home broadband without a disconnect, event though I have some 9 months left in the contract if Vodafone Ireland cannot provide the service required.
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Hello Aidan,
that’s a very interesting story You have here.
We are at the same point with Vodafone right now.
Contract signed at 18th Oct 2010 still no services at our house. No phone line, no broadband (up to 21 days which is very soon) and customer care is always saying that someone is taking care of our case and call he will call back:) Soon…of course.
10 days passed and we have no phone line and additionally someone assigned to us phone number from Dublin (01) instead of Cork Co. where we live:)
Since services are not provided by Vodafone within stated amount of days I think this could be a reason to terminate the agreement because of Vodafone breaching the contract.
You mentioned about smooth transfer to other provider (I would choose Eircom).
Could You tell me what’s the story with this?
Thanks a lot!
Regards
Daniel
@Daniel COMREG will be able to talk you through this. It’s them that will have to arrange things for you, unfortunately, if there’s a contract in place.
Hi Aidan
I was a BT customer for years and never EVER had a problem with them. then I was bumped off to Vodafone. Ever since ten I’ve had had nothing but constant disconnects. At least 3 times a day and sometimes for a few hrs. frequent calls to technical support fruitless. I must have the most tested line in the country because every time I’m on its the same rigmarole. “Please reset modem, leave it off an hour, we’ll reset the port in the exchange, we’ll do line tests, we’ll log a fault with our engineers”… blaa blaa blaa. None of this has worked.
I’ve tried new modem/routers, had my internal phone lines tested by an eircom engineer, replaced all my filters, reinstalled my operating system and nearly threw the PC out the window a dozen times. Still no joy.
Whilst its reassuring to know that I’m not the only vodafone customer suffering this bad service Its become fustrating beond belief.
Shay.