It's now been three weeks since we first started receiving complaints about various problems with Bulldog's services and this week looks to be even worse. Most of the complaints centre around delayed upgrades/migrations and poor customer support.

One of our readers (Greg) wrote in a simple summary, the highlights of which are:

Huge delay with lack of service when migrating to Bulldog – way outside their guidelines.

No one answers support, often you get cut off as the system is too busy to queue, at best you face a 45 minute delay.

Advisors do not know what they are doing – no technical skills.

Cannot contact operator or report a fault on phone line due to above.

Poor quality phone line – ‘beeps’ and degraded voice quality + for several weeks dial up modems would not function on the line.

Connection drops regularly, often several hours with no service and then several days with no drops, unreliable.

Their customer service, tech support and complaints emails go unreplied from.

Fault on phone line still not fixed after months.

Nearly all of the complaints we've had echo at least one aspect of the above listed issues, especially support quality. Sadly Bulldog does have a history of wishy-washy customer support, although last years 'improvements' now seem to have come undone.

Most of the other complaints relate to long delays in having connections upgraded (4Mb to 8Mb etc.) or when changing from another provider to Bulldog (migration). What's worse is that some users are being charged for services they can not receive.

The following example is from another reader (Wayne) complaint:

Where do I start? I ordered an upgrade to my package end of Feb and still waiting for it. I have had little communications from Bulldog and I have had to keep chasing this. I sent two e-mails to their complaints e-mail address which were both ignored by them. You phone the telephone number to speak with them and most often then not they will tell you they are experiencing very large call volumes and just disconnect you (its funny how you can phone the number to order a new line and get put into a queue, no disconnecting you from that number).

I wrote to one of their managers and that letter was ignored. I have now just found out that I am being charged for the package that I have not yet received.

Having to wait several months for a connection upgrade that doesn't occur, getting charged for it and then not even being able to communicate such a difficulty to the ISP is appalling.

Most of the other complaints centre on dropped broadband connections (line instability). We will be attempting to chase these issues up with the ISP for a response.