This morning I am writing from the passenger seat of Dad’s car as we drive into town. I have been “attempting” to install ADSL onto Dad’s PC for about 2 weeks. Let me say it has not been a smooth process.
After churning to Internode from Telstra Bigpond back in November, I have been raving about how good and quick the service is, so after realising Dad has been spending over $200 a month on 56K dialup (yes!) I convinced him to switch ISP’s and get onto internode.
Well we applied on line and seemed smooth. The modem arrived with some sketchy settings on a pdf emailed to him. I went to install the modem and 2 problems. One, an Ethernet card was not installed on the PC and two, internode were having problems seeing the modem on the line and suggested that a Telstra fault lay on the line.
Delay as one we buy an Ethernet Card and as we wait for Telstra – which to be fair, they did come out surprisingly in just 2 days. Telstra however say that there is no issue with the line but in fact the modem supplied by Internode is faulty.
After waiting on the internode help line via call back mode (which can take 2-3hrs!) Dad debates/argues with them that it’s the modem and not the line. The conversation typically goes from “no it cant be our modems” to “yes sir, we’ll send you a replacement”.
Two business days later (yesterday) the modem gets to Dad and I go last night to install it. After a small hiccup with the Ethernet drivers, I cannot get the ADSL gateway open as per the internode instructions. I log a call with internode and they are again having extensive delays on their help desk and hence we await a call back. In the interim I log onto the bloodbowl chat via my laptop and get some REAL tech support and get chatting to my mate gumbi. If you want to get real tech advice, talk to someone in IRC – its where all the geeks hang out :-)
Gumbi gets me to configure WinME to read the modem via TCP/IP protocols etc (I’m not 100% clear on what he did – but it worked) and I was able to connect! Bugger Internode! Then however whilst it is very quick compared to the old dialup, the speed is really only 300-350 kbps when we are paying for 1500kbps. Quicker than 56, but not what we were expecting.
Its at that point Internode call back and for the next 90mins, I am on with this techie. Nice guy, but sheesh, I wish they would stop instantly laying the blame on Telstra. “Must be a line fault” he says, and is incredulous that Telstra had been physically out and checked the line just 2 days earlier.
The modem “works” at reduced speed, but I cannot get to the Linksys site to configure the modem. It is timing out, stalling, freezing and hanging at the very site that forms an integral part of the installation of ADSL. Yet I can connect to anything else!
We try downloading Firefox and it works “better” and hence the guy says Internet Explorer must be the issue – yet IE6.0 is what the site is designed for! But whilst I get partial access to the Linksys config site, I can’t get to the firewall and security settings of the router and hence it goes un-configured.
Finally the tech agrees that if the only problem is the linksys configuration, then it’s a modem issue. Another one! He says, yes there has been an issue with the Linksys modem I have and they have had 50 returned this week, which is incredibly high. I tell him (yet again) that this is the second modem we’ve had that if their hardware people don’t contact me tomorrow (today) then I will churn Dad out to an ISP that doesn’t provide dodgy hardware.
I await that call – but seriously, is it too hard to expect that a company provides working hardware? Also their “installation guide” which is a one page pdf that is vague at best leaves a lot to be desired with many features / settings not stated or stated with options that aren’t even available when you try to do the install.
I churned from BigPond to Internode and kept my fully working ADSL modem from Telstra and it works fine. Internode works beautifully for me as a churn, but as a new install the experience has (and still is) shoddy.
I await their call….
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