This week, however, has tested my patience to the limit. The
problem has been a failing BT Home Hub 3 – twice a day or more it needs to be rebooted
to restart the wireless services, and as is common with these routers the
signal strength has dropped off so that I’m lucky if I can get a working
connecting from 10m away. And worst of all is that it’s my own Home Hub, so I
have to live with this problem myself. I
considered replacing it with a nice fast Netgear router, which is what I’d suggest
to a customer, but pennies are short this month, and out of some perverse sense
of masochism I also wanted to see just what it takes to work my way through the labyrinthine BT fault finding service.
This problem itself is a common one – Home Hubs fail often
enough that we Angels have all seen this problem before, and it’s going to be something
that is well documented on BT’s knowledgebase. You’d think therefore that it would
be a relatively straightforward job to get them to replace it – but actually no.
The first obstacle is their insistence that this is caused
by wireless interference. I'm pretty sure that they are working to a script
because I've heard exactly the same things said twice now, and as these
technicians have been taught this is part of their training the clearly believe
it. Wireless interference can be a problem, particularly in neighbourhoods with
lots of wireless routers, but there is an excellent little tool called inSSIDer
that allows you to map the levels and frequencies of any interference, and once you know which frequencies to avoid you can set a channel for your network that
you can be sure will minimise interference. When interference does occur you wireless won't stop working except in the most severe cases (think embassies making burst transmissions which are probably damaging you health as well as you wireless signal), but you will notice a performance
drop as your wireless connection slows.
After two weeks the engineers have repeatedly change my
channel (although without once resorting to any channel analysis), and all this
has at least taught me is that the Home Hub’s intelligent channel selection feature is a
complete joke. Yesterday for the first time one of the engineers actually
agreed that we might need to replace the Home Hub, but he then kept me on hold
so long that I actually forgot I was still supposed to be waiting on the phone
and went out. This should allow them to drag out my misery for another few days
at least. All the while the shiny new Netgear router is beckoning and I have to
admit my resolve is weakening, which is probably what British Telecom are
depending on.
In separate news I've been getting along very well with my
Nokia Lumia 930, but last week I suddenly noticed that I was getting a blemish
on all my photographs. The camera on this phone is pretty amazing, especially
for such a tiny device and I'm guessing that there is a speck of dust inside
the lens assembly itself which is causing the problem, however trying to get
this resolved has been another uphill battle. I purchased the phone from Carphone
Warehouse a couple of months ago and according to the advice given by the OFT
in their publication ‘Sale Of Goods Act Explained’:
“Any refund, repair or replacement you arrange with your customer relating to faulty goods must not cause them too much inconvenience and you will have to pay for other costs, for example, collection or delivery”.
The problem here is that Carphone Warehouse wants to give me
a dumb phone (as in one without any data) as a replacement while they sort out
my phone, which will cause a great deal of inconvenience as I pretty much run
my business from my phone now I don't have a permanent desk in either of our
service centres. At the moment I'm pushing for them to replace the phone as the
only viable solution that complies with their obligations under SOGA, but something
tells me that this is will be a case where what should happen will fall
short of what actually happens, and I'll be the one losing out. Where we've
faced similar problems ourselves as the retailer we've either bent over
backwards to expedite a rapid repair so the customer isn't inconvenienced, or taken the hit and replaced the
equipment - this isn't a case of us trying to keep to the letter of the Sale Of
Goods Act, but rather just a demonstration of good customer service.
One thing that both these stories demonstrate is our total
and utter dependence on a data connection both at home, in the office, and on
the road. In the old days we used to think of data loss as being one of the
greatest risks to a business, but with all the cloud services employed these days
that risk has moved into the background: the new risk is not being able to
access all that data. So what's your disaster recovery plan?
