I just received an email telling me I was going to be charged on the the 5th October for a broadband connection I don’t even have!

I left Plusnet on the 19th September so why do they still want to charge me? The email says “If you have any queries about this or any other matter, please don’t hesitate to contact our friendly Support Team on 0845 1400200 . We are available to take your calls 24 hours, 7 days a week.” That’s great but their friendly automated service centre doesn’t have an option for billing.

So I decided to use their online help centre. Filled in the form to remind them I don’t have broadband with them anymore and receive a notification telling me my question will be forwarded to the support team and I should get a reply in about 19 hours!

Is that good customer service? It seems it is pretty much the norm for UK companies now and we’re told it is the consumers fault because we expect to pay less for our services and basically they can’t afford to employ more staff and still make a profit.

Logging into my Google Sitemaps account I notice the following:

http://www.philipnicosia.com/gallery/index.php URL restricted by robots.txt Sep 8, 2006

But looking at a site command Google has indexed and cached this page despite being restricted by robots.txt.

This is Google’s cache of http://www.philipnicosia.com/gallery/index.php as retrieved on 18 Sep 2006 06:18:24 GMT.
Google’s cache is the snapshot that we took of the page as we crawled the web.

So I check with their robots.txt checker to see if there is a problem and it indeed says the page is allowed despite the robots.txt saying:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /gallery/

By adding the following to my robots.txt

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /gallery/

Google now recognizes that the directory is blocked.

So somewhere between the 8th September and the 18th September Google has decided that it is not like any other search engines and any page you have on your site is fair game unless you specifically tell Googlebot not to go there.

I’m starting to get really wound up now with the Sky Broadband provided Netgear DG834GT. I don’t know whether the one I’ve got is faulty or this is the norm but the wireless range on it is rubbish.

I’m struggling to get a connection less than 5 meters away from the router. Anyone else having the same problem?

I love living by the lake but at times it really does have it’s downside too. Over the last few days there seems to be a couple of hundred Canadian Geese arrive to add the ones that were already here and boy are they noisy.

When your laying in bed at 3 am and all your hear is them squawking (if that’s what they do) its no fun I can tell you.

The ducks quaking I can handle as they are not so loud and I find them quite soothing but these Geese are something else.

If only they came with a volume control!

Well it seams that my love affair with PlusNet didn’t last long. When they connected me it was at my old speed of 1Mb instead of the 8Mb that I had ordered. Bearing in mind that I had paid upfront £14.99 when I originally ordered it to have the speed upgraded to 8Mb I assumed that would have been carried out at the time of migrating.

Trying to get an answer from them was frustrating to say the least. Sales didn’t want to know now that I had placed my order and put me into the queue for customer support. This is where I got the recorded message saying “Your call will be answered in ……… excess of 1 hour”. 1 hour! I’ve got better things to do with my time than hang on a phone being charged for more than an hour.

So I decided to use their online help system. Luckily I did have an internet connection but imagine if you didn’t then your only option would have been to wait in excess of an hour to speak to someone. So I filled out my request for support which meant going through their menu system none of which really applied to my situation to get a reply telling me the average time of response is 17+ hours. I was fuming. How can a company expect to survive in these competitive times with response times like these?

Out of the blue I received an email from Sky saying they could now supply me with broadband. I telephoned them to ask what packages were available in my area and decided to go with their Sky Mid package which is up to 8Mb download speed with a 40GB monthly usage for £5.00 a month. I wanted Sky Max with the 16Mb speed but that’s not available for me yet. I have to say I was impressed with their sales staff. They gave me all the details I needed to make a decision and even told me that what speed I could expect from their service after doing a quick line check which turns out to be 4Mb.

I contacted PlusNet and told them I wasn’t comfortable with their after sales service and asked for my MAC code so I could migrate to Sky. In fairness to PlusNet they didn’t argue the point and supplied me with a MAC in a matter of hours.

I rang the MAC code through to Sky and the next day Sky Broadband contacted me by telephone to tell me my activation date for their Sky Mid Broadband package has been set for 19th September. They are also sending me out a free wireless router to use with their broadband. That’s someting that PlusNet don’t offer and Sky’s service is almost a third of the price too.

So its goodbye to PlusNet and hello to Sky Broadband.