My ISP screwed it again

Tuesday, January 16, 2007 at 15:41 | Posted in Finland, helsinki, internet, Personal | 4 Comments

Some people seem to know beforehand when their web connection will be broken. They can prepare themselves for the event. They may also let their friends know if something went wrong.

My ISP Maxinetti does not seem to learn from earlier mistakes. Last Wednesday I received a notice from them. It was printed on paper and delivered by snail mail which is somewhat goofey as our customer relationship has everything to do with use of the Internet. By the way, they also stubbornly insist on delivering the monthly bill on paper with a different reference code each month so I am unable to place a transaction order to my bank before I have received the printed bill.

They wrote that they would update the network which might cause some “temporary” down time. The updating was supposed to happen last week, “tentatively” either on Wednesday or Thursday. Alas, I could already have had a broken connection before the letter even arrived.

I have hard time believing that this update came as a surprise for them and they were thus unable to give notice early enough to allow me some arrangements to secure access to the web elsewhere. There was also not a word about this update on their web site. Their so called news page is dedicated to promoting their commercial services.

As there was no down time on either of the two days, nor any other day last week, I thought I would have escaped the annoyance. Not a chance! Yesterday afternoon at 5 p.m. as I was writing a lengthy blog post the connection suddenly went down and did not return before 9.30 a.m. this morning. After the line returned to life again, I could establish that there was still not a word about it in their web site.

Being cut off the web for more than 16 hours without a proper and accurate notice is unconvenient, to say the least, even if you do not use the connection for work, phone calls (I have no phone other than my Skype account), for getting news and entertainment. For me it was obviously a disaster. But Maxinetti is probably happy with their performance. And who knows, I may be receiving another letter from them in the snail mail tomorrow telling about the down time that happened.