UPC – Customer Service, Not !


For about ten days, maybe even two weeks now I’ve been having a bit of trouble with my broadband connection. It keeps dropping, seems to do it moreso during the day.

Now, I had assignments and stuff to do so yesterday was the first real chance I had to call and complain. I was on hold for 13 minutes before I got through to a ‘customer service’ rep.

I originally got UPC broadband nearly two years ago when I was living pretty close to the city centre and when I moved to my current address, UPC unfortunately didn’t over the area so I was using Clearwire. The speeds weren’t great but it worked.

When they installed the Broadband first UPC or Chorus/NTL, whatever they were called, also supplied a white netgear wireless router, which worked a dream and has been great for Wifi around the house and using the internet on our phones, especially great when I was on the sticks and couldn’t walk properly for seven months.

So when UPC starting offering Broadband here I jumped at the chance, I love watching baseball online and have a subscription to MLB TV. We also opted to get a landline number with the package. Along with TV channels, all in all UPC get €130 from us a month. That shouldn’t be sneezed at.

When the guy arrived to install the cables etc, he couldn’t get the new wireless router supplied to show up or connect on the mac so he tried putting it through the original netgear router that UPC had given me. This worked.

I got speaking to the lady who asked me to verify my details and number. I was calling from the number they have supplied me with. I told the lady that there was a problem with the broadband and it was dropping, which is very annoying. Trying to upload video to youtube or audio for podcasts is becoming a task which needs to be done at 2am as the connection kept cutting off.

Just before speaking to them the connection went off again. She told me that the connection had been online for 19 hours and the modem was working fine. Well, there’s the first problem, this is broadband always on, I don’t take it out so this showed that there was a problem. she checked her ‘technical details’ and said that there must be something wrong with my wireless set up.

When I told her what the workguy did set up the network and It had been working. She asked me to please hold and off she went again. During the week when I was having connection problems, I tried using the router with the Clearwire modem which I still have here. It worked perfectly without any problems or dropouts for several hours. Therefore I know the router was working, and the wireless on the computer and phone was working. Anyway isn’t too much to thing that the computer and phone wireless wouldn’t work at the same time dues to some freak reason?

Now remember I was calling from their phoneline. The lady arrived back to me and started saying that it would be up to me to get in touch with Netgear because it was ‘obviously’ a problem with their product. When I went to explain that the Netgear router was actually working fine with the Clearwire box and actually you guys supplied it anyway, she couldn’t hear me.. And kept saying ‘hello, hello ‘ as I replied ‘Hello can you hear me?’. She promptly put down the phone.

This is from a phoneline that UPC have supplied, she knew I was calling from that number and to be honest, while I’m paying them €130 the least I would expect from Customer service is a simple callback. She had all my contact details.

So I’m going to speak to a manager in the morning..

Last night again the broadband dropped, both wireless through my phone and my computer. It took me almost an hour to get connect to MLB.com so I could watch SFGiants play the Astros. I eventually got on when it was the 4th inning about 22.11 our time.

UPC, your bad… I expect a decent response, being nice on Twitter doesn’t matter a toss, if you have sh1t customer service/technical people working for you – no matter how good your internet is when is working, It’s the crap customer service and their response when we have problems, that people remember.

Get Your act together.