ubaldo huerta

After (recently) moving to Madrid I had high hopes to de-link myself from all things Telefónica; I even dreamed that voice land line was no longer needed but just a broadband connection and now the even more notorious skype for occasional calls to regular phones. Wrongggggg! As everyone knows (but me), you’ll till need a separate contract from Telefónica (and billing hassle) to get your basic voice line, and then (and then means 21 days at least) you get your DSL line

So, once friends were surveyed and sites consulted, I narrowed down my choices to jazztel; for silly sentimental reasons, the fact that CEO is a compatriot and a entrepreneur hero (depending on who you talk to), also weighed on my decision.

Now the tragic dilemma:

Jazzhell has incredible courteous customer service folks; they’re knowledgeable, they even instruct you to run netstat –a to see if you have a neighbor sucking up all your bandwidth with wifi client, etc. No complaints, really, specially compared to the lemons they recruit at Timofónica de España that without remorse hang up the phone on your face. It has happened to me, several times.

The problem is that jazztel service sucks. Here is the list of problems with my DSL/voice integrated flat rate plan, in no particular order:

1- Download speed changing all the time, some days I only get 50 Kpbs. Have they ever heard of SLAs? To be fair it’s been better recently (last 3-4 days). Still, though, I haven’t seen the 4 Mbps I was suppose to have by end of September

2- Modem won’t synchronize for 15 minute to 2 hour interval 2-3 times a week

3- Both DNS servers not reachable via ping or not responding anything meaningful several times a day. I’ve been rsyncing a lot of files lately and need to restart cron jobs all the time

4- Certain local numbers (in Madrid) are simply not reachable. If you use the telefonica prefix 1077 you’ll get to them. They haven’t solved this after repeated calls to CS. In total I have 3 tickets opened.

5- Calling international is even more insidious. A lot of calls don’t go through (message sayings circuits are busy). You call using the telefonica prefix and bum, you’re in (I don’t know if 4 and 5 are part of a larger telefonica conspiracy to obstruct free competition since they own and operate some circuits but I this point I don’t even care anymore)

Why should I do folks? Should I give ya.com a chance? Any other reputable operator out there? I’ll do everything (within reason) in my power not to give my business to telefonica out of the silly (perhaps) principle that I’m promoting competition with my actions (and the time it takes me to write this note). I also had too many nightmares with Telefónica 2 years ago; wounds are still open, don’t even want to go there. I waited 2 months for the suckers to install it

Gimme a hand, would ya! Which operator should I pick?

This entry was posted on Monday, October 3rd, 2005 at 2:45 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.