The last 7 weeks or so i have been trying to switch my internet / phone connection to a different provider. Previously i was a client with BBeyond, a business only provider in the Netherlands. UPC had an offer i could not resist: a business level subscription, with a 99.9 % uptime guarantee, and a promise to send a technician within 4 hours in case of trouble. Also, a fixed ip addresses 2 phone lines are included. And all of this for a mere 42 euro per month.

In hindsight this sounds too good to be true, but at the time I was thinking i was going to make a good decision, with lower monthly cost than I ever had. Oh well.. things never are as good as they seem right? This is what has been happening over the past 7 weeks:

• When porting the phone numbers from my old provider, they didn’t take into account I wanted to actually port 2 numbers. Since UPC’s operation is mainly geared towards servicing consumers, that have no option for 2 phone lines, their internal systems probably could not take the surprise of handling 2 ports for one client. Of course this was fixed by ever so friendly UPC personnel.
• After my phone numbers were ported, they never really worked correctly (save from the few moments after a modem reboot or something like that). The problem is that conversations constantly are broken up by a deafening silence. It takes a few seconds before the connection gets established, so if you are too quick to say your name (like can be done by an other phone system in the world I would think), people on the other side never hear who you are. And also.. during conversations, gaps make it very difficult to understand each other

So, of course I have been in constant contact with the UPC Business support desk. In total, this is what has been done to “fix” my problems:

• 3 home technicians did several measurements and fixed each others mistakes (e.g. the original installation was not done to specs, which I find disturbing in itself)
• 2 Network technicians did several measurements in the street in front of my house, and fixed several problems with connectors, cabling, amplifiers etc.

All to no avail. My phone connection is as bad as ever, and my hunch is that it is caused by the type of gateway that is used: a Cisco EPC2425. Now this is a nice gateway, however it is crippled by the UPC specific firmware that gets pushed to it. Advanced settings of the thing are not available at all, WIFI settings are limiting (SSID NEEDS to start with UPC, forcing you to advertise the fact that you are using a UPC internet connection.. that’s a little tidbit they didn’t mention in their contract).

As of last week, this gateway became utterly useless because the UPC firmware update they are pushing to it is corrupt. This corruption means that settings i need to be able to set all of a sudden are invisible. So.. in effect, right now, I am not using the UPC internet connection at all anymore, and I am finding using my mobile phone more and more simply because the quality of the land line is just so poor.

So, what is UPC doing to actually fix this? From my point of view, they are doing exactly nothing. Apparently a few tickets are still open with their support, however, I fail to see any progress. They don’t keep me posted on what is going on, I need to contact them myself over and over through an expensive 0900 phone number etc etc. 2 days ago I’ve been in contact with 2 different persons of UPC support, both of them assuring me that i would be called back by someone with deep knowledge of the UPC network, and that that person would surely be able to fix all my problems.

In my conversations with both persons I told them that I would be discontinuing my contract with them, due to the fact that UPC has not been able to deliver for over 7 weeks now. Although both persons reassured me that they would not like to loose me as a client, neither of them took it upon him to actually be the owner of my problems and make sure personally that my problems are being fixed.

To date, nobody contacted me, so .. my gut feeling is that this is it. I will contact my old and trusted internet provider, BBeyond, and ask them to port back my phone numbers to their connection. Theirs is not a bad service, and i made the mistake to think that the grass was greener somewhere else.

Oh, by the way, sorry for this rant, but I needed to get this off my chest in some way. I spent a lot of money and time to get this fixed, and I reached the conclusion that I should take matters in my own hand again… Thanks for bearing with me :)