Am feeling a bit grumpy so decided to do a bit of a rant. I have had cable broadband at my address in Wellington for many years, and these days we rely on the cable for things like receiving emailed accounts (which have overdue penalties), entering hours worked to an employers on-line facility, making bank payments, running cloud backup, working with cloud based applications, Skype communication, social media interaction, making online purchases, not to mention general use of the web, so it is nearly as critical as electricity and water supply. These days we are encouraged to rely on online services so now that we have developed this reliance we must be provided with a reliable service. I almost changed my landline to VOIP recently but fortunately after some experimenting decided its reliability was not good enough.

However I've had intermittent and now zero broadband for around 2 weeks. I've spoken to Vodafone and Downer a number of times. Whenever they inspected the problem it went away but had returned within a few hours, so I then had to be allocated a new time slot a few days later rather then having an immediately return, exasperated of course by weekends, nights and my work commitments. Finally it has been 'narrowed down' to a network issue but I'm told this will take five days (presumable week days) to get authorisation before any more work can done. This is ridiculous. It means our internet will have been faulty for three weeks.

We do have mobile broadband so this helps but the inconevenience is high, sometimes it drops to dial up speeds, the desktop PC and other hardwired devices still can't be used, and the data cap is nothing like the cable so activities are very limited.

I also recently subscribed to a T-Box, and this fault is preventing it from recording programs so we'll miss out on some of these permanently. Fortunately we can watch Freeview (but not record it).

Should I expect better service from Vodafone?