Karoo – excuses from a monopoly provider
I’m on Karoo broadband, I have no choice living in Beverley.
I pay for a 25Mb service and currently in my area the average is 5Mb at the most.
For the past week I have had terrible problems browsing the web (even trying to browse the help section on Karoo’s own website), just simply loading pages with no video has been a trauma sometimes.
I have clocked my best download speed over the past week at 232kB/sec and my worst? 0.4 kB/sec, yup, 0.4! Today it told me it would take me 33 minutes to download a 50 Mb file…it would be quicker to dial up! At least if I dialed up I would get IMAGES displayed on web pages instead of red crosses!
So doing any form of web browsing or even downloading emails/uploading websites via FTP is a lottery, a real case of “try it if you can”.
Anyway, I had a VERY illuminating conversation with Technical Support today (having spent 18 minutes on hold) and it transpires that Karoo have “100′000s of people in the Hull area with the same problem”. It transpires also that this has been getting worse over the last “few months” and that Karoo have known about these issues for a good while before that.
The Technical Support guy admitted that it was down to a lack of investment in the infrastructure and “not knowing that all those extra 1000’s of customers would have a detrimental effect on the network”.
I know, I was stunned too.
But get this, apparently their engineers are working flat out to sort out the issues “on a line by line basis” and they will get round to me “when they do” (exact words here) and it could be “up to a month”.
A month.
To fix an Internet service I have NO choice is using.
A service which I pay for but do not get.
Hmmmm
So apparently my recourse is to write to KCOM “Customer Services” and complain, and try to get a refund. So having spent the best part of 5 hours over the last week either on hold or talking to Tech Support, performing various repetitive download tasks whilst they “try something” on the line, I now have to waste even more time trying to get a refund for something that I am not even getting?
Is this REALLY what Customer Support is all about?
Is this really what the people of Hull and surrounding areas have to out up with?
Very shoddy.
OFCOM, you listening to this?
