AOL is the PITS ...

Last Updated on Thursday, 11 March 2010 14:41 Written by Jim Dorrington Thursday, 04 March 2010 23:50

AOL is the Pits ...

How long can this company continue to fleece it's customers?

Story 1

In December a customer called to say that they could access some web sites but not others. Specifically they could not access Facebook, Hotmail and Rhapsody.

I checked everything I could think of and could not find anything wrong with their installation, so called AOL as a last resort, and endured the tortuous labyrinth of button choices and lectures to get to a human with some technical ability, only to be read the standard script and then be hung up on. On my second attempt I had more luck – AOL admitted that they were having some server problems but that it would all be fixed in a few hours. Needless to say three days later it still was not fixed – so I migrated the customer to an alternative provider.

Story 2

Within the space of a couple days two customers, 20 miles apart, reported that their broadband just stopped working. Both were AOL subscribers. I advised them to call AOL who insisted that the fault was at the customer’s end. Once again I visited both sites and found their installations were not at fault. Calling AOL again and sticking to my ground eventually produced a startling result: AOL had switched the customers to a new set of servers, requiring :-

• A new router username and password
• A complete change to the router’s communication method:-

 Encapsulation: PPPoE

 Multiplexing Method: LLC-based

 VPI: 0

 VCI: 38

 MTU = 1450

Neither of the customers had received any notification of this change – least of all their new logon credentials, but AOL was happy to continue charging them for the non-service and to cap it all – insist that there was nothing wrong at their end!

When I pressed the technical support person, he very candidly admitted (also acknowledging that the call was likely to be recorded!) that AOL’s service had deteriorated dramatically over the past 3 years and with this particular router problem incident AOL had notified only 35,000 customers of the change, but according to internal records 70,000 customers had been affected!

Draw your own conclusions, but I can see why the recent Which? report rated them as one of the worst Broadband suppliers