Surely there's a solution?

Even those ISPs such as 'EzeSurf', that has top quality speeds and services, have run into serious troubles with support. People wanting to activate their new 'Surfsaver' account or perhaps changed their Caller Line ID (they moved house etc.) will all run into a rather painful wall when trying to get help. This is a very serious situation and one, which ISPs are simply not bothering to address.

The solutions are simple, hire more staff and get more phone lines into the office for those staff to use. The problem? Nobody wants to because they've miss judged the market they intended to intersect with and are less than keen about paying out more money to employ extra support staff. It takes a lot of people for a freecall ISP to make it into the clear; even the biggest still have a long way to go before they can break even.

The only way around this problem is to take a similar rout to that which 'Visual Depth' recently used when introducing their service. You limit the number of subscribers to say 20,000 (first couple of months) for a service that can cope with 50,000 and slowly build up. The key idea being, you won't need so many staff if there aren't so many problems and so far this rout has succeeded, so far.

Sadly for those ISPs that have already taken on more than they could handle, there is no easy way out and as always your best cause of action is to wait and see. ISPreview continually advises that nobody signup for a new freecall ISP until its had around two months of successful operation, we have little sympathy for those that jump in the deep end without being able to see the bottom.

A final warning

Before we finish up, there is another evil in the works that people need to be aware of, it's called "premium rate and cost incurring lines". Conspiracy theorists love this one, some go as far to accuse ISPs of actually causing the problems so they can make money not out of the service, but those that call expensive support lines.

Truth be told, the picture of a man owning an ISP with two modem terminals on a 64Kbps ISDN backbone is somewhat humours, but then you never can tell the validity of these things can you =). So be careful, freecall ISPs that use premium rate lines or similar (most of them), could run into problems and that may unjustly incur a cost on you after having called THEIR line to fix a problem with THEIR service!

Shouldn't they have to pay YOU for not giving the service YOU paid for? Why should we have to pay for their mistakes? This whole issue raises more questions than an English man in an American action movie, oh yes, yes indeed. Sadly there isn't such a quick way out as there is in, always wait and see what happens because freecall ISPs seem to always change their services and quality AFTER launch and not before.

Raises the question, what on earth ever happened to consumer rights in conjunction with Internet service providers? We don't seem to have any.

<<[Main Page]