Telecom Mayhem
November 04, 2005
When I was born, the planets must have been aligned in such as a way as to cause Telecom Mayhem in my life. Because, the absolute worse case scenario always happens to me.
Recent case in point - anyone reading the blogs around August/Sept will be aware of the difficulty in getting my broadband set up when I moved. That all got sorted and I then had great difficulty moving my calls and line rental to Access Telecom. That all got sorted.
Now I just got a bill from UTV internet for calls and internet! The really worrying thing is that they just have free rein to charge my credit card for whatever amount they want. 3 phone calls from me and I've found someone who is not working off a script. 2 hours of getting to the bottom of it later and we've established I am being charged for calls by Access and by UTV. And if I want to get rid of UTV, they have no option but to put my calls back to eircom...
I got on to Access and they have also been charging me for my old phone number - amalgamating old number and new number onto the 1 bills in an opaque uneasy to spot way...
I telephoned ComReg the telecoms regulator because, costs aside, I am very worried that UTV can just charge my card whatever they want. The nice girl at ComReg talked about process and procedure and before I nodded off, I gleaned that if I wanted to complain about this, I'd have to do it officially and UTV would have 2 weeks in which to come back to me. And then what? they've still charged my credit card unlawfully as far as I'm concerned.
God this country's telecoms sucks. At least if that Swiss company buy eircom, they might inject a little swiss precision around their organisation. In the meantime, I'm off to investigate using Skype for everything.