The date came, and the next morning, I received an email from provisioning congratulating me on my connection to Orcon Home+. However despite having an ADSL2+ signal on my line, I was not authenticating.
After many calls to Orcon support, and speaking to some support techs who were helpful and friendly and some not so much, we finally determined that Chorus had not actually switched me over to Orcon's gear at the exchange.
Now another wait (albeit a shorter one) ensued as I went back through the provisioning queue.
Finally got a connection up and running on Friday afternoon of the the 28th, and I had shiny new 12Mbps down and 800Kbps up! But just to sour the relief that I finally had my connection up and running, my line was no down with no dialtone.
Several days, many more calls to Orcon support, and another exchange visit from a Chorus technician finally saw my phone AND my internet up and running.
I didn't however have my previous number moved and while I'm sure I requested this, Orcon seemed to think I hadn't. But, since we'd just moved in, I decided to live with the new number in the hope of just having some great uninterrupted service.
Now at this point I still did not (and still don't) have call waiting or voicemail on my line, despite being on the Gold+ plan. After speaking with support again they informed me that voicemail was having some teething problems and would be load soon. I'm not too worried about this, but I hope to have these all sorted if I'm paying for them.
All ran well for the first 4-5 days, before my router dropped my connection and would not come back up. Waited a while and did several router reboots and still nothing, so back onto support (oh man I hate that hold music). About 2 hours later I got reconnected.
The next week ran pretty smoothly, until last night when my connection dropped again, and would not come back up, this time at about 4.45pm. I jumped back on the phone to support and was assured that my problem had been passed through to tier 2 support and they are onto it, but as it's after 5pm I may not expect anything until tommorow.
Now I certainly don't expect Orcon to have a full team 24/7, but considering they're offering this new service, which based on my experience is not without it's issues, I would have thought that they might have a bit of overtime happening from support to ensure things are running smoothly.
I was a bit stressed by this non-committal promise of maybe tonight and maybe tomorrow, as I had clients waiting for site changes to be uploaded, and my backup connection through my cellphone was also playing up. However I figured there was nothing I could do and simply hoped that when I woke up in the morning, all would be back to normal.
So I get up this morning and I'm still not back up and running, so I'm back on the phone to support and all they tell me that my ticket from last week has been reopened, and I'm in the queue. I enquire as to an ETA on a fix, but all that I'm told is that since I phoned last night around 5pm, it could still be until tomorrow at midday before anything is resolved!
At this point I'm pretty frustrated, and I asked the guy I'm speaking to if there have been lots of other people having trouble with LLU connections and he implied that there had been.
Now as I said above, I don't expect miracles and 24/7 support here, and I understand that teething problems do occur with new products, and as an early adopter this is sometimes the price you pay. But I am getting frustrated, especially with little explanation as to why problems are occurring.
While I'm not a network engineer, a bit of explanation as to what is or might be wrong is much more calming than "your in the queue, and it will be looked at in 24-48 hours".
Has anyone else out there had troubles with their new LLU connection like I have? If you have, I'm sure you would agree that frustration levels could be kept at bay with a bit better communication from Orcon.
PS. Sorry if this all comes across as a bit of a rant, but I've just tried to brain dump what has happen over the past few weeks.
Scott