Optus suck… but I should have known that…
Back online finally. Terrible problems with the phone line that were entirely the fault of Optus led to us having no phone for a couple of days, then no DSL for a week, which was much harder to cope with than I thought it would be. But we survived, and the posting is back on track 🙂
Optus have given us pretty good service over time, but in the last couple of month’s it’s suddenly sucked. The DSL is good as well, a little overpriced maybe, but that’s tempered with their excellent $0 startup deals, which is the only reason I could get it to begin with. And it all seemed fine for a while…
… Until we discovered that no one was charging us for our phoneline. Which seems great in theory. Until we worked out that Optus didn’t know we existed. Some jokers called RSLCOM had somehow become our carrier but weren’t billing us, and Optus wasn’t billing us, but when no one wants to bill you it’s actually a bad thing. This all should have been solved in January, and I thought it was, because I talked to an Optus guy and he got me to answer all these recorded messages to get reconnected to them, and it should have been fine. But then suddenly a week ago…
Out phone line was dead. Disconnected. Didn’t work at all. So naturally, the DSL went out as well. Called up Optus about it, and it turns out that they still didn’t have us as a customer, and that this was somehow still the fault of RSLCOM, and they were the ones who had disconnected us. After some polite screaming at Optus, then a call to RSLCOM who still didn’t seem to know about us, I gave up and called the Telecommunications Ombudsman. It’s where you go when everyone is screwing you around and you want a result.
And that’s what I got. Dean, the guy on the phone there, listened to my problem, gave me a special Optus complaints line to call, recorded my complaint and gave me a number to use. When I called Optus at their special helpline, a completely different level of person was immediately accomodating and got my phone back on the next day. However, as is typical for this country, I was told the delay in getting my DSL back online would be up to a week, because Telstra have to do that, and we all know that Telstra suck already. At least she promised me a month’s free service.
So I was stuck without DSL for a week. But now that it’s finally online again, I haven’t received any discount (just paid my normal fee a few days ago via auto deposit), and the emails I’ve got from them make me think there could be more problems next week, if they decide I’m a brand new user. If that happens I will be investigating ways of getting out of Optus altogether, even though I have 8 months on the contract left.
As it is, I’d get out of Optus now if I could – iiNet’s new deal is looking so much better, and I have all the hardware I need now. We’ll see what happens…