Generally I have been very happy with J-Net. As Thailand internet service providers go, they are pretty good. The internet is usually available, it is usually fast enough; and when things do go wrong, an English speaking person seems to care and sorts it out.
And I needed a caring English speaker on Wednesday afternoon because the wide wide world of web disappeared and didn’t come back. My PPP was down apparently, and the message on my router was in red, so it was a bad thing. Gave it a couple of hours and then called J-Net. Much concern expressed by the young lady at the end of the phone who said she would check and call me back. And she did (which itself is a minor miracle in this place), to give me the bad news it was “a line problem”, which is support desk speak for we don’t know what’s wrong and whatever it is may take a while.
Fortunately we are not restricted to J-Net when it comes to web access. Someone else in our condo has a very reliable and quite speedy connection, and more importantly he/she has an unsecured wireless network. So we just hook into our neighbour’s wi-fi service and continue to surf when our connection disappears. I guess some (particularly our neighbour) would call this theft, I like to think of it as unofficial sharing. And as I am sure my neighbour sleeps well at night, it doesn’t seem unreasonable (to me) to download torrents from his service during the hours of darkness; very useful.
But after three days without a service of our own, I was beginning to fret and eventually lost the plot a little with the caring English speaker who had no answers, and demanded to speak to a manager. Didn’t they know I had a business to run? (I don’t). Did they realise just how much inconvenience I was being caused by this extended outage? (Not a lot really, thanks to the above-mentioned neighbour). Did they know how close I was to cancelling my valuable account and moving to TT&T? (They must have realised that was an empty threat). Anyway, I ranted on for a while and demanded some urgent action otherwise heads would roll.
And would you know it, the internet came back on within 2 hours?!
But not through anything J-Net did. Having complained so violently, I thought it would be prudent to make sure that I was in no way responsible for the problem. So I pulled an old modem out of my computer bits drawer and plugged it in. It worked. Turns out that the problem which J-Net had been hunting for three days was actually a failure in my modem/router; a just over one year old and therefore out of warranty D-Link piece of crap.
But never mind that. Having put the wheels of extreme complaint in motion, I had to apply the brakes. I called J-Net to tell them the service was restored, without actually telling them how.
Err, hello, my internet is working now.
Yes sir, we are aware of the problem and working to fix it.
No, sorry, I said that my internet is OK now.
I know sir, we are working with TT&T to try and fix the problem and hope it will be resolved soon.
Please, please, listen to me. MY INTERNET IS WORKING NOW. I DO NOT HAVE A PROBLEM.
Well maybe sir, but there is still and intermittent problem in your area and we are working to fix it.
Ironic really. When you call to report a problem to most internet service providers in Thailand, their first response is that there is no problem. And when you call to tell them you no longer have a problem, they tell you that you have one.
So next time I have a problem, I will call them and tell them everything is working fine. That should mobilise the support troops. But I’ll check my modem isn’t buggered first.
Comments 🔗
2009-10-05| Billy saysXS4ALL is excellent, 20Gb/second and only ever had to speak to them once in seven years, and that when we moved house without telling them .. only one drawback, you have to live in the Netherlands … maybe stick with J-net …