As with last post, if you have a reference number from telstra email me and i'll be able to tell you when your connections scheduled for as it will be re-entered in the system from Monday now.

Sounds exactly like my experiences with Telecom!

Is there a smaller provider staffed by actual human beings (rather than a giant entity) who can provide the service you need?

Telecommunications hell:

We had a monitored home alarm, so ticked the box to have the wiring done. My understanding of this was, and continues to be, that they essentially connect the second "pair" in the house (normal phone lines have 2 pairs coming in to the house connection) to broadband, leaving your home alarm to do its thing on the existing pair.

It took forever for someone to come out, and when they finally did, the technician had no idea what she was doing, complained about the previous wiring job, complained about how the alarm had been wired in, stripped out the alarm, disconnected our land line and then left until the following day. The following day she came back, abandoned the attempts at re-wiring the alarm and connected the broadband up to the second "pair" like I had thought she would to start with. And left the alarm disconnected. The alarm company quoted between $300 and $400 to reconnect it. She remembered to re-connect our landline though, which was a bonus. Then I received a bill for $249 for the "wiring service". I rang up the company and also put my complaint in writing - I am not technologically inept, if I had wanted to cut through the home alarm wire with a pair of side cutters I would have done it myself. Eventually they wrote off the wiring charge. And we never got the home alarm re-wired!

Cancel the contract. They have failed to fulfil their contractual obligations. You could fax this through since other forms of communication are being denied you! I had similar problems with the same company a few years ago. Obviously nothing has changed. I would not go near them again.

We had exactly the same experience with TelstraClear. We gave up on them after the 4th or 5th time the promised contractors failed to show. So we went with Orcon instead. Six months later TelstraClear ring us out of the blue to tell us they had contractors coming around to connect us the next day! Like we would still be waiting.

We have never had any problems with Orcon and when we moved house it was really simple and there was no time lapse between the switchover between the old house and the new house.

No point signaling out one ISP in particular, I think you will find this sort of crap happens with all ISP's. What about the Telecom XT fail last week. No ones perfect, far below actually.

Just on a different perspective - I have TelstraClear cable to my house (have for many years) and I find that their service is generally good. More importantly, my internet is very fast (better than at work in a large government organisation) and I never have a problem with rain-fade on my cable TV. However, I admit that getting through on their customer service line can be tricky.

I’ve found Telstra Clear to be very helpful and for the most part on the ball, when I first called to enquire about their services they did let me know that this time of the year was very busy for them (this was about 3 weeks ago) so there could be some delays. They had a technician come to my place on the Tuesday I believe, and I called on the Friday previous, the tenant before us did have Telstra so that probably helped with the location and install. I fortunately work only a 15 min walk from home so they set it up so that the technical would call me 15 mins before he was heading over so I could still go to work. He was very helpful. unfortunately the modem did die a couple of nights later, these things do happen though, no real fault of the company, I called Telstra they ran through everything they could with me, even had their “Mac guy" call me as the other didn't have a great working knowledge of Macs, when all the setup was seen to be correct and it still wasn't working they sent the technician over that day, again calling me 15 mins before so I could go to work, and apologised for the inconvenience. A new modem was put in and the technician even called a few nights later to make sure everything was still all good. None of the installation cost me anything. The girl that I first set the account up with was very friendly, and also stated that we can cancel anytime with out a cancelation fee. I've found them to be great. he was very helpful.

After letting TelstraClear know we were moving 2 weeks ago, they tried to call us back once and never bothered to follow it up. Apparently, they now have a policy that if you have a telecom landline, you cannot have TelstraClear Broadband. It only applies to new customers, but they neglected to let existing clients know who choose to have a landline with another provider.

I chose clear as they had a great reputation, that was years ago and prior to Telstra getting hold of them.

Any ISP recommendation gladly accepted. Wanting reliable and able to go over Telecom copper.

We have shocking customer service in New Zealand. I canceled with Ihug when they got bought by Vodafone because their service turned to custard and 2hrs on hold was not a good use of my time. Am now with Orcon and have had no troubles so far. The only time I had a problem was when the Chorus guys were replacing the cabinet in my street and they knocked out my line. The solution to that was walk down the road and tell them to fix it! The Orcon guy told me it would take a week if he put a ticket in with Chorus.