Is there anything Slingshot can't screw up? Really, aren't capped plans sold because they're supposed to be absent of these problems?

Seriously, the install problems - assigning two phone numbers and two DSL connections to the same line - were hilarious, and taking over two weeks to get that sorted out was even funnier. Kudos to Slingshot for not making me pay for the new install: but to be fair I would have paid for it over my dead body. At the same time, kudos to Downer, because they're the ones who bumped the engineer forward by five days for me. So you don't get Brownie points for unique service levels. Sorry.

High points of this process: unaccountably rude tech support guy acting like it's all my fault for not being an engineer, tech support guy trying to talk over me while I'm explaining the problem, tech support guy telling me that I should be able to tell if my house is wired up when SS have sold me the connection and hooked it up, and SS people not calling me back at specified times.

Then the connection starts and the speeds are terrible. So bad. 300Kbps... slower, slower. 150Kbps. It somehow gets sorted out - normal speeds on my return from down south. I get sent a new modem, again, kudos to SS, but after spending an eternity setting it up and getting it to work, that manages to make the connection perform worse. It also doesn't have wireless N. Back to the old modem.

Then this week, the outage. Followed by terrible speeds - horrendous peak time browsing. Nothing else running - web pages are at a crawl. Starts working when it gets past 11.30pm, but I don't want to be sitting here at 11.30pm every night. This isn't downloading anything - this is browsing. This goes on for days.

We know - because of the "off peak" speeds of up to 1.7Mbps - that this isn't a wiring problem. Clearly, if I sit here until 3am, it'll work fine. So the problem isn't my wiring. So there's another problem that craps out my connection speed until "off peak" times. I'm giving this problem the nickname "Slingshot".

Then today, on my billing day, I reach my bandwidth cap. I deliberately didn't go up to the limit because I didn't want to be slowed to 64k. But I reach my bandwidth cap this afternoon. Yet today is my billing day - the day it should return to zero. Right? The email says:

"You’ve just reached your monthly data allowance limit. To save you money and a lot of hassle, we’ve slowed your plan down to dial-up speed. You’ll be back to broadband speed on your next bill date (27 Feb 2012 ), but if you can’t wait that long, you do have a couple other options:"

But this is my bill date. That's today. This email came at 1.41pm. And now it's 6.45pm and the money still hasn't come out. And I'm on dialup speeds. And I can't get through to the call centre, and the online request I sent has a turnaround time of 2 days.

Hilariously - there's a lot of comedy involved here - my subscription to my streaming football services in Europe that I haven't been able to use properly HAVE come out of my bank account. But not SS services.

No billing summary in Visibill. Nothing except the $155 I paid for setup. No, not even a new billing period.

Slingshot: seriously. I've never had so many problems. I'm one more away from churning. This, by the way, might that one problem.