That said, on the reasonably rare occasions when the service goes down, it may be just a few minutes. Or, as happened recently here in Los Angeles, it may be an hour or more … and *may* also involve your television cable and, possibly, the phone service if you’ve got TW telephone service. Usually it’s not all three at once.

That said, when the service does go down and you’re desperate enough to call, TW tech support generally knows nothing about it and instead assumes that *you* know nothing about either Internet services or computers in general. Fun.

Then my mother decided to switch her phone service from BT to a rival company. This, of course, doesn’t mean that someone else supplies the line – BT still do that – but someone else bills for the service. The day after she switched, a BT engineer appeared on the pole outside the house. My broadband has been highly unreliable ever since, and it is clear from talking to the guys at Zen that there’s nothing they can do. BT are happy for them to take the rap for the bad service.

However, the poor levels of customer service for paid broadband services are another question entirely; my connection with NTL is usually top-grade and problem free, but on the few occasions I’ve had to contact them about anything, their customer service has been mind-numbingly bad. It seems inconceivable that an ISP will not interact with their customers via the medium of email … until you consider that they are also a phone service provider, and hence make a good clip of money from putting you on hold for up to an hour. The only reason I’ve not changed provider is ‘better the devil you know’.

As a whole I is very contented, which thus occurred.

Which is desirable to say separately. So this that that the situation with the suppliers the Internet services is considerably worse than situation which you here described. And to make with this anything is impossible. If it is interesting, then my history with the suppliers the Internet in Krasnoyarsk, Russia can be read in my blog – http://brj.pp.ru/2006/09/27/change-supplier-of-internet-services/

Over here, the experience of those who enjoyed apparently ‘free’ surfing – and how this has a major impact on their enjoyment of the internet – means that I pay for my broadband connection.

My main gripe is about broadband suppliers not notifying me when they drop their rates or introduce new speeds. It’s entirely down to me to make sure I’m getting the best rate. I keep checking and I haven’t yet found anybody doing unlimited access beyond the initial introductory period for much different to what I’m paying my existing supplier – which is (I think!) £23.95 per month (or about £45 per month). I’m not sure how much more expensive it is over here – but I do know I keep looking at the rates being paid by people in Europe – and wonder whether that’s what explains the differential take-up.

In Malaysia though, that’s another story. Because the current ISP monopolizes the broadband service in Malaysia, they do get away with atrocious service, technical and customer. We’re talking about downtime that goes for days, speeds that are actually slower than its dial-up services and for a lack of a better word, mechanical and clueless customer service.

What can people do about it? Nothing because the Telecommunications company controls everything there.