Advantis Home Maintenance Ltd.

Company Capped, Crippled and Cut Off by THUS/Demon

This is an article I never thought I’d have to write but I thought it wise to alert other small businesses to the concept of the ever lower and creeping broadband usage bar being undertaken by not only my provider THUS/Demon but others as well. In a shocking discovery that we weren’t pre-alerted to our business has been crippled by this buried policy and apparently there is ‘not thing one’ that THUS can do about i. We are being punished for going over our non-contracted data usage amount. I do agree that we went over this one time in last five years I thought it a little over the top when they insisted that nothing can be done to reverse the decision. Apparently we must be punished for thirty days!

The story started last month when our server started throwing out the occasional error for which we could not find the cause. Over the next week we lost our mail server due to overly large housekeeping and data files which filled the drive. In our attempts to repair the problem we discovered hardware issues which was the actual cause of the problems a week earlier. As our files were now corrupt and the physical disk issues were causing problems copying files off the bad drive we decided to rebuild the server and make some other changes and upgrades at the same time.

To make a long boring IT story short, we built the new box, installed the software and downloaded all of the appropriate service packs required to bring everything up to date. This also caused us to upgrade our laptops as well. I suspect this is why we were DEMONised or THUSed. Unfortunately for us we had another week of data reconstruction to get our damaged mail files back on the server and working and yet another week configuring our user and utility accounts. THUS of course has an automated system which doesn’t care if servers are down or for that matter that email addresses actually even exist. In fact the address they sent to has never existed as we have never used ‘postmaster’ as an address. Over a period of five years the address they were using. So they sent an email to nobody at an account that they invented telling us we were bad people and slowing us down to 128K.

As we didn’t get the warning of course we didn’t know we were over their limit and therefore carried on our business as usual. Thinking that we had configuration problems after the re-build we of course spent countless hours trying to figure out why we had these speed problems. Try running a business that uses Google Maps and Web Based Accounting and Scheduling software everyday not to mention the myriad of other non-business services we access in the course of a week. We did finally get the ‘knuckle wrapping’ email once all of the accounts were again configured and of course we called to find out how to rectify this crippling problem.

Interestingly enough THUS says that they cannot overturn the decision. Their kit cannot be reconfigured once its been set. There is no way to talk to anyone in authority and there is no fine that can be paid for our bad behaviour and interestingly enough there is no way to escalate the problem. I’m sure glad that my business doesn’t run that way as I’d be out of business! We also queried the fact that we weren’t informed and was told that their automated email would suffice. In mentioned that in cases where one is having there services cut I would expect like BT, Virgin Media and other utility companies that perhaps a notice by post would be more appropriate to business users but THUS informed me that “email was more reliable than the post as letters do go missing.” I stand corrected yet again today by Demon Customer Services.

The bottom line to all of this is that if you run a business and are serious about using ADSL check out the capping policy which is usually buried about three or four pages down on some obscure web page as even the larger business packages have a cap and it would seem that if you go over even once in a period of five years as in my case that you will be closed down. Interestingly and I hope on the taped conversation used for security and training purposes the operator I spoke to informed me that if I upgraded to the next package up there was no cap. I told her she was wrong as I had already read all about the next package up and there was a cap. She insisted that I was wrong even when I told her what page to go to. Bad news when your staff strts believing the company line without ever checking for themselves. We made alternative arrangements on a partners home ADSL so we could run our payroll and pay everyone before Christmas but it has caused misery to the lives of our staff, our outside vendors and customers alike as we have grown to depend on the services being there when we need them.

THUS of course owns the service and they can do what they like, when they like, and there really is nothing you can do about it. I know that because that is what Demon Customer Services has reminded me time and time again this last week.