The dominant ISP for Hull in East Yorkshire, KCOM, has announced the introduction of their new “PRO Team” service, which claims to be the “first of its kind in the UK” and involves sending out a special engineering team to help solve customers’ Wi-Fi woes, router problems and buffering issues for free.
Strictly speaking it may not be entirely correct to say that such a service is the “first of its kind in the UK,” since a number of other ISPs have done or continue to do something similar (e.g. TalkTalk’s Bright Sparks team). Likewise BT and Openreach have been conducting Customer Premises Engineer Trials (Qube engineers) to help “resolve broadband issues” (here), although that won’t be free.
However, it’s probably expected that the PRO Team won’t have to deal with the same array of complicated broadband problems as seen on Openreach’s copper network, not least due to KCOM’s £85m project to cover virtually the whole of their network area with Gigabit capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) infrastructure by March 2019.
Sean Royce, KCOM’s Managing Director, said:
“Our full fibre broadband guarantees some of the fastest speeds in the UK right to our customers’ front doors – but sometimes people can’t make the most of these because of in-home issues that happen after that.
A lot of external factors can affect your broadband experience – including interference from other appliances, the positioning of your router, the age of the devices you’re using and even the construction of your house itself.
This is something broadband customers across the UK experience and we’re the first ISP in the UK to do something about it.
To help our customers experience the very best Lightstream has to offer, our PRO Team will visit people’s homes free of charge to offer advice and provide technical assistance on how to make their broadband achieve its full potential.”
As part of the announcement KCOM has produced a very tongue-in-cheek homage to a famous movie, which attempts to recreate the start of Quentin Tarantino’s cult classic Reservoir Dogs.. albeit with PRO Team engineers. Granted some readers may cringe but it’s actually not too bad.
“Granted some readers may cringe but it’s actually not too bad.”
I dread the ribbing those staff are getting!