After almost a 2 years of really good internet service from Bulldog, they have gone down to the bottom of my books. By service I mean the actual DSL, not their customer service which has been and still is absolutely appaling.

So come last week Saturday, the DSL is down with the modem constantly training and then dropping the connection. The signal to noise ratio [1] was pretty low so I thought it was a simple service issue. Contacting Bulldog, they said that an engineer would get back to me within 48 hours. [2] 48 hours later, no phone call was received so I called them back. An unhelpful desk jockey promised another 24 hour wait after which I finally received a call from an engineer. This “person”, and by person I mean un(der) trained idiot, decided that there was no problem on the line and his explanation was that it was a new installation of a street light [3] that must be causing the high noise on the line. A street light? You must be joking.

So the argument began. I asked that someone go out to the exchange to see if there are any other problems. My friendly engineer told me this was impossible as they would have to call BT and since BT are a voice only company (WHAT???), they wouldn’t be able to do anything, and anyway his line test said nothing was the problem. As I was transferred to a senior engineer after 20 minutes of futile arguing, I noticed that my home line was dead (I was on my mobile). He then admitted there was a problem with the exchange and someone would go out. I agreed to be called back the next day and be rate-limited to 572Kb/s until this was fixed.

Next day arrives and I receive a call from Bulldog again. The exchange has been fixed and my line should be fine. Mr Engineer then removes the rate limit on my line and it immediately starts dropping again. Bulldog then say because of the noise, my line can now only hold 1Mb/s, down from the 3.5Mb/s I had the previous week. This is the point I threw my toys and tried to put my case across, that this must be because of a fault! At this time, at the height of my temper, my string is at the shortest, my DSL line is screwed, the engineer lets me know that he wants to go home and I would have to call tomorrow. Huh?

They refused to listen anymore as it was closing time and he wanted to go home. He constantly interrupted me, wouldn’t let me get anything across. I must make it clear that at no time did I start being rude. I was not difficult, I was only trying to let them know of the problem which they definitely did not want to hear about. So after another “discussion”, I have a Bulldog modem being shipped to me to test as they still don’t believe its the line. I am perfectly happy to test with another modem but I was not about to purchase a new one. To their credit there was never any question of me paying for a modem, they simply shipped one.

Even rate limited to 1Mb/s, my signal to noise ratio drops at times to 1, averaging 8 which is still pretty low. How on earth does this happen? No wonder Bulldog was investigated by Ofcom for their shoddy service. The quality of service was disgusting. When I complained to the senior engineer about the treatment from the 1st level rookie, he maintained that he would have done the same thing. Even After I proved them wrong about the exchange fault, he refused to admit that they had made a mistake. So what happens with other clients who have an exchange fault? Must they all argue for 20 minutes before you will listen? And Bulldog, if you’re reading this, train your 1st level support people better because ff they can’t explain to me what the problem is without stuttering down the line at me, don’t bother providing a customer support desk. Its worse than no service at all.

I’m sitting now, waiting for the modem to arrive and if its not the modem’s problem, what are you going to do? Limit my 8Meg package down to 1MB? Thats somehow sounds unacceptable. I’ll post again once the modem has arrived and I’ve spoken to Bulldog again.

[1] The signal to noise ratio is now much noise accompanies the DSL signal. No matter how good your line is, there will always be some noise. For a signal to noise ratio of 10, this means for every 1 part of noise, there are 10 parts signal. Wikipedia Link.

[2] Compared to Easynet, where their 1st level support engineers answer the phones with the ability to answer questions immediately. Bulldog’s support desk are message takers who pass off the problems to engineers that you cannot deal with directly.

[3] He had no proof that any such “street light” was installed, it was just his opinion

By the way, the title of this post is intentional. ;)