[WXC/VFX] VFX appears not to want to take my business (from Orcon)

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richard1088

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#98545 1-Mar-2012 13:09

I just had a very sad conversation with VFX Sales staff.

I currently have naked broadband with Orcon, and use the VFX service for my phone line, My intention was to move the DSL service from Orcon to Xnet because the broadband rates are a little better for my level of usage,

I made it clear to the sales rep that I wanted a seamless transition for my internet, or at least for him to guide me through the process so I could minimise the disruption.

When the sales rep checked, he noted that I was on Orcon equipment at the exchange, and therefore that they could not offer the "churn" service, and the transition would not be seamless. Fine, then could he please tell me what the process would be? After waiting 5 minutes while he talked to his supervisor, I was told that my only option would be a full, new line provisioning and engineer visit, complete with new wiring, to sit alongside orcon! WTF??

So, now VFX has lost my business. I will now move my VOIP line to Orcon instead to take advantage of their bundle packaged. My current spend on VFX is about $900-1000 a year.

Nice one VFX.

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#588833 1-Mar-2012 13:34

You asked to have minimal interruption, they gave you the option. The alternative is to wait for Chorus to put your line into the exchange, after disconnecting Orcon, which could take any time - and out of their control.

johnr

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#588841 1-Mar-2012 13:47

Can't blame VFX for this!

jbard

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#588843 1-Mar-2012 13:50

johnr: Can't blame VFX for this!

+1

They did as you asked and now your not happy with the options - not their fault!

richard1088

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#588883 1-Mar-2012 14:34

Nobody I spoke to was able to guide me through the process and, from what I'm hearing from Freitasm, has no interest in doing so.

It seems that if you are an Orcon ADSL customer, and wish to move your business to VFX/Xnet then you need to wait an undefined amount of time with no Internet and only then will VFXbe able to assist. Or, go get a new phone line.

Are we saying that VFX has no control or influence on this at all? Not even as a customer of Chorus? Clearly not, if it's easier to actually get a new line installed!

But hey, it's obviously not easy for me to get a new line installed, especially when an engineer will need to call, and I'll have to pay for it. It's much, much easier and cheaper to move my VOIP custom to Orcon.

So, no blame here, just an observation on how poor customer service can lose an otherwise good company business.

I've exercised my rights as a consumer.

VFX 0, Orcon 1.

RunningMan

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#588886 1-Mar-2012 14:39

Umm, it's not their fault you are currently connected to Orcon equipment so there is a physical process which is more complex than a simple change of ISP that are also using Chorus equipment.

They are not mucking you around, or promising stuff they can't deliver, they're simply being upfront and honest about what you need to do in order to have a seamless transition. Some companies may not tell you this, and then you end up without service for a period.

If they are the correct long term solution for you, then it makes sense to go with them - to me, the fact they are trying to make a seamless transition for you is a very good thing...

Essentially, there's likely to be downtime as soon as the Orcon gear is disconnected. You can either avoid this downtime by having the WxC connection in place prior to the Orcon one being terminated (what WxC have suggested), or perhaps set up an alternative backup (mobile / 3G perhaps?) as a fallback if things go wrong during the transition. Or, just accept that you may be without service for a period.

You said you wanted seamless, they've offered you a good solution. Alternatively, there's some other options mentioned above, which may not be seamless, but should reduce disruption.

cisconz

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#588887 1-Mar-2012 14:43

I agree they should have given you more options, however the downtime between the 2 will more than likely be less than a couple of hours, they are just covering their bases. if it were me I would take the jump and use my 3g modem for the interim.

Edit: To clarify, the OP eluded that the sales guy did not tell you the normal time frames.
Normally as it has been said below they have 1 tech removing the orcon service then another connecting the chorus one, normally this happens on the same day, but not always.
If it was me I would have asked the standard time frames, the worst case ones and the way to have no downtime.

Hmmmm

RunningMan

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#588889 1-Mar-2012 14:49

richard1088: It seems that if you are an Orcon ADSL customer, and wish to move your business to VFX/Xnet then you need to wait an undefined amount of time with no Internet and only then will VFXbe able to assist.

Close, but not quite. If you are an Orcon customer on their ULL equipment, moving to any other ISP, then you may have an unspecified amount of time without service. This is because (in layman's terms), Orcon has to send a guy out to the exchange, and disconnect their gear. Then Chorus (or the new ISP) come and connect you to theirs. Because they are different companies (to a degree, opposition) nobody will guarantee that this will happen all at the same time, there are too many variables.

WxC appear to be trying to set a realistic expectation level of the worst case scenario, so that you are not left high and dry.

richard1088:

Are we saying that VFX has no control or influence on this at all? Not even as a customer of Chorus? Clearly not, if it's easier to actually get a new line installed!

As above, Orcon will have to do their bit first, and until that is done, WxC or Chorus aren't directly involved in the process, so they don't have control until halfway through. That's the whole point, they are not going to guarantee something that is outside of their control.

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Zeon

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#588893 1-Mar-2012 14:53

richard1088: Nobody I spoke to was able to guide me through the process and, from what I'm hearing from Freitasm, has no interest in doing so.

It seems that if you are an Orcon ADSL customer, and wish to move your business to VFX/Xnet then you need to wait an undefined amount of time with no Internet and only then will VFXbe able to assist. Or, go get a new phone line.

Are we saying that VFX has no control or influence on this at all? Not even as a customer of Chorus? Clearly not, if it's easier to actually get a new line installed!

But hey, it's obviously not easy for me to get a new line installed, especially when an engineer will need to call, and I'll have to pay for it. It's much, much easier and cheaper to move my VOIP custom to Orcon.

So, no blame here, just an observation on how poor customer service can lose an otherwise good company business.

I've exercised my rights as a consumer.

VFX 0, Orcon 1.

You are making up your mind without understand the process or what's involved. As mentioned because you are on Orcon LLU equipment you can't be switched between ISPs sharing the same Chorus wholesale equipment. No matter what ISP you wanted to go to, this would be the case. Your best bet is to get a router which supports a 3g usb dongle backup e.g. PFsense. VFX works fine over 3g and in fact, did this myself on Monday for a client.

Expect maybe a day of outage.

And secondly Orcon's voice service IMO is crap. We tried them out for our business and could never get their service working. We also had to mess about and double home our PBX as each of their trunks requires a unique IP (so no good for failover either). Anyway we never left Xnet as a result but I still get their emails. I'm not kidding but I get an email at least once a day about problems around the country with their voice network.

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richard1088

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#588950 1-Mar-2012 16:22

I get it, that if I'm on an Orcon DSLAM, then it would need to be changed to one that VFX/Xnet own or can deal with.

However, this is not what VFX told me.

I was told I would need to get an engineer to my house to install a new line. i.e. new copper to my house.

There is, by the way, no reason why the DSLAM change can't be as good as seamless, as long as Orcon give a disconnection date, and VFX / Chorus mark this in a calendar. They have a month to get co-ordinated, and the downtime should simply be the time it takes to plug in the new gear. This is the way it works in the UK for unbundled loops.

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#588961 1-Mar-2012 16:32

Probably depends on what you define as ?seamless?.

The rep may have interpreted this to mean literally *no* disruption whatsoever, which means your only option is to install a second line alongside the first, then disconnect the first. Some people might require this if they are running servers or something, or a home business

However if you are prepared to have a few hours of downtime then you probably should be fine.

RunningMan

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#588985 1-Mar-2012 17:10

richard1088:There is, by the way, no reason why the DSLAM change can't be as good as seamless, as long as Orcon give a disconnection date, and VFX / Chorus mark this in a calendar.

As it's mentioned above, in the majority of cases it will work fine, and you may only be out for a couple of hours. However, WxC (BTW, VFX is a product, not a company) is very unlikely to make an absolute commitment to you that things will be fine, as they are dependent on Orcon (a competitor) getting things right first. If Orcon screws up their side of the bargain, then it's WxC that looks bad, not Orcon...

richard1088:
They have a month to get co-ordinated, and the downtime should simply be the time it takes to plug in the new gear. This is the way it works in the UK for unbundled loops.

Yep, but things can and do go wrong from time to time (even in the UK I'm sure). I'd expect that WxC are just wanting to set the expectation level low, and then exceed the level, rather than setting it high, and then having something go wrong.

freitasm

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#588997 1-Mar-2012 17:42

richard1088: Nobody I spoke to was able to guide me through the process and, from what I'm hearing from Freitasm, has no interest in doing so.

It seems that if you are an Orcon ADSL customer, and wish to move your business to VFX/Xnet then you need to wait an undefined amount of time with no Internet and only then will VFXbe able to assist. Or, go get a new phone line.

Are we saying that VFX has no control or influence on this at all? Not even as a customer of Chorus? Clearly not, if it's easier to actually get a new line installed!

Chorus is the wholesale provider. ISPs have no control over the transition. They can only put in requests. If by any chance you are with Orcon and Chorus receives a request to transfer your connection they will unplug and connect to another port. This is not managed by the ISP.

The suggestion you received is to have a technician come to your place, install a second line and when that is working then disconnect the old one. This ensures you have no downtime. They are playing safe, you asked for minimum impact.

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#589046 1-Mar-2012 19:51

If you want to see what can go wrong read a thread in the Slingshot forums from a few days ago. A customer who was unhappy with the way his phone worked on a Slingshot ULL connection wanted to be moved back to a Telecom landline. Many days later he was still without service as the disconnection of the ULL service, and reconnection of the Chorus service onto the same copper pair wasn't seamless.

You've requested they deliver you a seamless handover between connections, and the only way this can be done is to install a new WxC DSL connection at your house using a new copper pair into your house and then request a number port of your current Telecom phone number to the VFX service which will then disconnect your DSL and current phoneline.

As explaind above this can be done with maybe half a day downtime between a disconnect and reconnection, but that's a big maybe. You wanted a seamless cutover, and that's what they've presented you with.

maverick

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#589065 1-Mar-2012 20:44

Sorry just picked up this, been to the Movies with my beautiful wife.

Sorry to hear you are unhappy with the options Richard, Knowing the sales team they are more than willing to help customers, I'm guessing they took a bit of time to consult with the senior team leaders to make sure they could give you an option that didn't affect your down time, unfortunately as others have pointed out this is the only option besides you perhaps having a 3G backup connection.

The problem is that even with having a bit of notice we can not tie up differnt contractors to do the job at exactly the same time and even though it is just some jump erring going between differnt networks will cause some downtime, something I'm guessing my sales guys took to heart when you pointed that out.

Sorry to not to be able to meet your requirements but please don't be to harsh on the sales guys, they do have the customers interest at heart but they are not all Jedi masters and no amount of "using the force" could guarantee keeping your connection up unless you a clean install or a 3G failover for the duration.

Again sorry to see a loyal VFX customer go if we cant meet your churn requirements you need to do what you need to do, but we will always be happy to have you back , no matter what you think of us