Enough is Enough

After suffering from major latency issues on World of Warcraft for the past week, (12000ms time outs), I finally phoned my Internet Service Provider to abuse them about the pathetic connection I have had to live with for the past week.

However, not without doing some thorough testing by myself first.

I'm in I.T. as well. I know how long it would take if I would have to do all these tests again when on the phone to another tech support person. I would have to go away, do the tests, and then call them back. The additional time wasted by being on hold everytime I would have to call back really doesn't appeal to me

I found the existing connections to the World of Warcraft (WoW) servers from my laptop though a Netstat (command to show connections on all ports). And then I did Tracerts (tracing the connection from source to destination), to those ip addresses. And lo and behold, I found that on the 7th hop it would time out and show me an * on 3 outta 5 tests. The other times it would have a lag time of about ~300ms.

Hop 7 had an alias of Sydney.Telstra.net... which really does seem a bit suss.... I mean if it had died at something.us.net then I might be barking up the wrong tree in thinking that the issue was with my ISP and not with another external source.

Just to make sure, I even went a step further to isolate the ISP from my WoW game play. I took my laptop to a friend's house which I knew was using a different ISP to me.

It was wonderful. No lag. My latency bar was green and not red. I even managed to squeeze in two games of AV before going back home to call the tech support line.

The first call I made, the guy asked if I had problems with the Internet in general, to which I replied 'No', then he asked if I had issues recieving emails, to which I also replied 'No'. When I told him what was my exact problem, he said in terms of their policy, its not something they look after.

I told him the main purpose of me getting ADSL was to enjoy playing WoW on their fast internet connection. Something I wasn't getting anymore. After debating for a bit more, I asked to speak to someone else who could understand a tracert (this guy had no idea), I was put on hold for a further 20 mins. By the time I managed to talk to a 3rd person (the 2nd guy didn't know what WoW was), my cordless phone ran out of batttery.

I had no choice but to call back on my mobile (yes.. costly I know). 15 minutes more, and I've had just about enough. By this time I had made it to their level two tech (or so I was told), he advised that there wasn't anything he could do for me, but I could try send ing through all the outputs from the tests I had done and construct my case in an email and mail it to them.

Why couldn't they tell me this 1++ hr ago ?!??!?!

For that matter, after hearing me blabble on for an hour... couldn't they lodge a case for me !?

I.T. support personnel are supposed to be 'Helpful'. (I try to be helpful to my users and clients). This however, was anything but that.

3 days later I called again to check on the status of my case. Apparently nothing else had been done to it. I asked to be put through to the sales department. But they couldn't transfer me through, and asked me to call the sales number directly myself.

Once through to the sales department, I requested for my Internet to be disconnected. When asked for a reason why, I simply told them I've had enough their crappy tech support. The 'disconnection' call took about 5 minutes. But I had lost count of the amount of calls I had made to the tech support people, and the amount of time wasted trying to troubleshoot their problem for them.

Damn, I can feel the value of my telstra shares dropping already.

So thats it folks. Until my application with iinet gets completed, I'll wont be able to post as often as I would want to. Fingers X that I'll get my new internet connection sooner rather than later!