Atlantic Totally Incompetent ! ! ! !
I know ! ! !
I was with ABSA Internet for many years and still from the days when they introduced ABSA Free Internet dial-up. When this was no longer available I continued with them on their new pay account package until October last year when I finally packed up the wind-up dial-up and went for ADSL. Was not the cheapest package or best by any means but really had no problems at all. That is until middle of February when Atlantic migrated and took it over!
First problem, I had a small hobby based website - this was now offline without any mention on how to rectify. Don't bother phoning because you are number 10 million in the queue, and then if you do wait for ever and get to NUMBER ONE in the queue, you get politely disconnected. And emails didn't seem to do much good either, in fact the last few email I had tried sending them came back with "delivery failure" - mailbox must have been over-flowing with complaints! Eventually I was able to speak to a few people and then somehow managed to get the new FTP account details out of them so that I could re-upload the site. Fine, so the site was now online but at a slightly different address (not using a domain). Problem was, the site was slow and in most case pages wouldn't load. Images contained with my files would take forever to load or not load at all but images linked from other locations were displaying promptly and without fault. So I brought this to their attention and was told that they would look into this and it will be fixed within a week.
Roughly around this time I had sent them a email enquiring how to go about cancelling my service with them. A few days later I got a call on the cell phone to find out why I want to cancel and if anything can be done about it, so I indicated that I was not happy with their service but would gladly let them try and sort things out. Spoke to another technician and again was assured that the fault would be sorted out. Again, no results.
Now here's where it gets interesting... So the 3rd of March, which was a Monday if I remember correctly, come home to find the connection is down. Restart the modem but still no connection. The "connected" light is on and everything seems to be working as it should including of course the line, but no access to the internet. But, the free and included dial-up connection seemed to work, of course no good because sending mails to them is just a waste of time... So some more phone calls and then leaving messages I managed to eventually get to speak to a technician the Wednesday, and right there in the conversation I decided enough is enough, and I made it clear that I needed to have the account cancelled and get refunded for the month of March since I was not getting what I had already paid for while still having other problems. More phone calls the next day to ensure that this instruction was followed while at the same making enquiries with Axxess regarding their ADSL packages. So I get home with the guest login details for Axxess and through I would see if the Atlantic connections were still. Well ADSL was still not working and then I tried the dial-up which was also not working - wow, quick and efficient at "disconnecting" your service.
So I signed up with Axxess that night which was the Thursday and I would say during the course of Friday morning my new ADSL account was activated and available to use! So back on the line to deal with Atlantic's accounts department, because if they can "cut" your connection so fast and effortlessly then surely they can process the refund as quickly!?! Well, after loads of calls that were mostly not the most pleasant and about three weeks later money refunded.
What a battle! And it is sad that while ABSA provided me with really good service over the years when whatever the problem I was having it was sorted out within 24 hours, Atlantic from what I experienced is just not up to the challenge and as far as support centre goes, hopeless! So far I have been enjoying the service that I am getting from Axxess and the few enquiries that I have had with them via phone or email have been efficiently and pleasantly attended to.
On closing, competition is tough out there and if you can't provide the service then really, maybe just leave it to those who can!
Philip.
Have the same problem with them.