Sunday 19 August 2007

Unexpected surprise


My ISP at home is the much maligned Australian telco, Big Pond.

We have unlimited cable broadband and it's top notch.

At least it was until last Thursday.

I received an email saying we had exceeded our monthly usage allowance, so our supply was going to be slowed to 64k for the rest of the month.

That's two whole weeks!

Given we have unlimited usage I couldn't understand how we could have exceeded our usage.

Seems we get a 10gig allowance, after which they slow us down. Shaping as they call it in the industry.

Thing is, our connection became so slow it was virtually unusable.

I couldn't get any email, as my computer would time out before it was able to download mail off the server.

To say I was pissed off is an understatement.

I thought about ranting about Big Pond on the blog. Instead I listened to my wife, who told me to ring them up.

The lady at the call centre offered to upgrade me to 12gig for an extra $10 a month.

I resisted and told her how unhappy I was with the service.

Guess what she did?

She gave us an extra 4gig for this month.

Free of charge. No questions asked.

Now that's customer service.