My initial call was taken by the usual out of Country call centre who had me wait on hold for a period of time. Once the call was taken I was told that I had to call between specific times on Monday to Friday only and speak to the disconnect team. As a plumber, gas fitter and electrician it is very difficult to call back during the day so I made the call a few days later.

My initial call was taken by the usual out of Country call centre who had me wait on hold for a period of time. Once the call was taken I was put on hold for a period of time and then told that all of the lines to the diconnect team were busy. Could I call back later. I said no and I was put on hold for a period of time and then told again that all of the lines to the diconnect team were busy. Could I call back later. I said no and I was put on hold for a period of time and then told again that all of the lines to the diconnect team were busy. Could I call back later. I said I would call back later.

I called back a couple of days later. My initial call was taken by the usual out of Country call centre who had me wait on hold for a period of time. Once the call was taken I was put on hold for a period of time and then told that all of the lines to the diconnect team were busy. Could I call back later. At this point my head almost exploded! I did however keep calm and explained that I don’t sit at a desk all day. I work on the road. They then suggested that perhaps someone could call me back. I said no. I work on the road and was heading out as soon as this call was sorted. They then suggested that they could email me the MAC that I required. WOW! What a concept! Perhaps they could have suggested that a week earlier and saved me from going over my free call cellular limit. I said ‘yes please’ and sure enough a few days later I had my code.

So it would seem that after punishing us for our excessive usage they also make it difficult to leave them. You would think they would be happy to get rid of a company like ours that has downloaded 20 gig too much once in five years. Our new supplier ZEN Internet has much the same policy in place but if we go over our usage we don’t get crippled and left to suffer. We can throw some money at the problem on a permenant or temporary basis. That’s all we wanted in the first place. Goodbye DEMON. Goodbye THUS. Hello ZEN.

Related Posts

No related posts.

So I started by replacing the MS-Office products. After some research I found the Sun Systems Open Office would be a good replacement. After downloading and setting up the software, which was a non-issue, I ran the two Office products in parallel for a few weeks. In that time I opened up old documents of all types, re-saved some in the new format, some in the old and generally tried to check all possible scenarios. No problems were found so we removed all Microsoft Office products from all of our machines. Bye-bye Billie. A painless and cost effective project.

We also decided to remove Internet Explorer in favour of Firefox. As with Office we experienced no issues to date. The one small exception is being nagged now and then by Windows asking us if we want MS products to be the default products on the system.

We have three issues left to resolve. The first major issue is how to replace our Exchange server with another package that also has a desktop application much like Outlook. The second big issue will be to move to a Linux Desktop environment and the third issue bringing Linux to our Server. On that day we finish the world will still be turning, Bill Gates will still be rich and in business, but we will have saved a lot of money and still be in business also.

So in short, it would seem that you can run a business without using Microsoft. There is other software which functions as well as their software does but without the fees. Business is tough enough these days without the extra and excessive licensing costs.

Related Posts

No related posts.

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.

Related Posts

No related posts.