I'm pretty much done with WorldxChange.

My speed on their service has never been stellar -- on the best days I get between 3.5 - 4 Mbps down and 350 - 500 kbps up, and that's in the early morning/afternoon when few other people are online. During heavy usage periods I'm lucky if I get 1.5 Mbps. This is in Palmerston North, about 2 km from the CBD.

Those stats are during the best of times... and over the past month or so, it has definitely not been the best of times.

I've been having random, total losses of connectivity almost every day for the past month. When I lost connectivity on my old modem, it wouldn't reconnect automatically even though it's supposed to. That meant if my service went down while I was asleep, I wouldn't find out about it until I woke up to an empty email inbox hours later (I can always tell immediately if service is down or not by the number of emails I wake up to; if it's less than five, I know there's a problem).

I've contacted WxC I don't even know how many times over the past month about this problem, and their response has always been the same: "We can send a tech out to look at the line, but if it turns out to be a problem with your equipment, you'll be charged $200 for the callout."

Well, fine. I finally got hold of a replacement modem just to make sure it wasn't my gear causing the problem. I disconnected my line filter and plugged it directly into the wall jack to make sure the filter also wasn't the problem. I plugged my computer directly into the modem via ethernet to make sure it wasn't my wireless router causing issues. Basically, I pared everything down to the absolute minimum.

 It took over an hour of tinkering and 45 minutes on the phone with WxC tech support before I was finally able to get any sort of connectivity. The first guy I talked to was very helpful, and the issue was temporarily resolved -- for about 30 seconds after I finished my call with him, after which my connection completely dropped out again.

The second guy I talked to was incredibly rude and refused to go over my modem settings over the phone; he insisted it was a line fault and no alteration of settings was going to change anything. When I told him I'd rather make sure it wasn't my modem causing the problem, he said, "I don't want to waste your time or mine going over this when no setting change in the world is going to resolve this issue." I said, "I'd rather waste the time than waste $200 if a Telecom tech comes down here and finds out one simple settings change could have fixed this problem." This guy still refused to work with me, so I insisted he transfer me to someone else. He hung up on me instead. Nice.

I called back, and fortunately I got the first guy again. We spent yet another half hour or so on the phone trying to figure out what was going on with my connection. I finally got to the point where I could do some basic browsing, and he said WxC would monitor my line for faults for six hours -- he insisted this was the only way Telecom would agree to look at the line. Odd that I got two completely different stories from two different techs.

For the first three hours of the six, I had barely any connectivity at all. When my internet service was running at all, I had download speeds of about 1.05 Mbps and upload speeds of 50 kbps -- not a typo. That's on multiple devices, by the way; it's not just one computer on my network that's choking along at a terrible speed, it's all of them.

According to SpeedTest, that means 91% of New Zealand has a faster connection than I do. I live in a city with 80,000+ people in it, so it's not as though I'm in the backblocks. Clearly, something is not right.

I called back at the end of the six hour monitoring period, and the tech told me there had been no reported line faults. No line faults, during a period when I spent half the time unable to access the internet at all. The tech told me WxC would once again monitor my line, and I'm supposed to call them back yet again tomorrow.

I am extremely dissatisfied with WorldxChange's service. This issue should have been fixed a month ago, but I've been dealing with daily outages and terrible speed instead. I work from home as a freelancer, so I am absolutely dependent upon a reliable internet connection. Losing my connection to the internet and spending hours on the phone with tech support means I lose productive time that I could be spending doing my job instead.

I have no confidence that WorldxChange will ever resolve my connectivity issues, considering it's been a month of back-and-forth with no resolution in sight. I keep getting different answers as to whether a Telecom rep can even be persuaded to check the line for issues or not. I've swapped out every bit of my own hardware that could conceivably have been causing these issues, so it's clearly not a hardware issue on my end, yet WorldxChange still insists on waiting, monitoring, and sitting on their hands rather than resolving this issue once and for all.

I can't even remember the last time a company dropped the ball so badly on a service that I'm paying this much for.