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God Bless Telefonica !

By Jo Green - Mon 14th Mar 2011

I know a lot has already been written about Telefonica - significantly, how they are a bunch of incompetent, thieving and lying idiots, however, I felt that I needed to blow off a little bit of steam and add my feelings into the pot of festering communal hatred.

Firstly, we have Telefonica - landline and ADSL and pay the extortionate fee of about 39.99 for ADSL, Plus about 12.99 For Land Line, Plus Calls, Plus IVA , which means that all in all, the monthly factura is rarely less that 80 Euros.

For that I get the giddy heights of 1meg.

Because I live 'rural' I can't get anything any more.

And it pains me enormously whenever I watch UK TV to see how Virgin, or BT or whoever offer 20meg Fibre optic ADSL, plus a landline, plus 50 Channels of TV, plus a Mobile with unlimited usage, plus a small family hatchback, for around 20 Quid or whatever (maybe I'm stretching a point, but you get the idea...)

So yesterday, after 24 hours of intermittent service with the ADSL flicking on and off, I didn't feel any guilt about calling them up and demanding that they did something about it. My OH works from home so it's an important thing for us, and as I had only recently sorted the exact same issue out at my work, I felt confident in tackling the same problem at home and volunteered to do the job.

16.40pm : Called Telefonica Customer Services - Although I speak some Spanish, with a technical matter like this I prefer to speak in English. Waited 5 mins on hold to speak with an English speaking operator, to be told that I needed to speak to 'Technical Services'. They couldn't (or wouldn't) transfer me, and instead gave me the number so I could call myself.

16.55pm : After holding for what seemed an aon, I finally got to speak to a technical engineer. He didn't speak English and told me that neither did any of his colleagues (How odd ! - Telefonica provide seemingly hundreds of 'New Client' English speakers to sell you a service, but NONE to help existing clients with technical problems). I struggled to explain what the problem was in Spanish, and he confessed that he didn't know much about ADSL and shuffled off to find a colleague that did.

17.05pm : A second 'technical services engineer' (For the sake of being polite I'll let that term stand for now) came on the line and asked me to repeat the whole sorry tale - that the ADSL kept coming on and off, that the lights on the router flashed like a christmas tree, but that we had a continuous land line connection - could he test the ADSL on the line please ? - Apparently not - We needed to contact customer services to better explain ourselves in English. But Customer services don't deal with technical problems..... you see where this is going ?

17.10pm : Finally a third Engineer came to the phone and told me to unplug the router and then plug it in again. This, I was assured, would re-set the connection. I had already done this countless times, together with checking that the fault was with the router by changing it with the spare, and by changing the ADSL filter - the problem was with the line, I was sure I explained...

17.20pm : After relenting and agreeing to unplug the router, leave it a minute and restart it as requested, I returned to the phone to find that the engineer had hung up.

And as such I resigned myself to the fact that I had wasted a half-hour, got no answers to my problem and satisfied myself that Telefonica simply did not care. Yes, the procedure did work, but equally so it worked earlier on in the day ( four times ! ) that my OH had done the exact same thing. We didn't need to know how to re-set a router, we wished to know A) What the problem was? B) Were they aware of it? C) Was something being done about it? D) How long it would last for?

Answers that we never got.

And so far today the connection has dropped out just the twice.

God bless you Telefonica, and thankyou for you untiring pursuit of excellent customer service - you are worth every penny of your record 10.17 Billion Euros profit that you reported you gained for the whole of 2010. I am only saddened that it was an paltry 32% Increase on last year's profits when you so clearly deserve so much more....

Comment on this Blog

 

Yet Another Update : I saw a Telefonica offer, that gave a landline connection together with 6mb of ADSL plus free calls to Spanish landlines for 45 Euros Inc IVA.

On calling Telefonica to change to this Tarrif I was told that it was only possible to change to this if I already received a minimum of 3 meg. Which, living in the Campo I don't.

So, I am stuck with paying 60 Euros plus, with no free calls, and with with less than 1 meg ADSL - Much more than somebody with a faster connection who also gets free calls.

Can anyone please explain the logic ???

Jo Green - Thu, 27th Oct 2011
Further Update : Still nothing back from Telefonica as a result of the Twitter message. Called Telefonica again on Mon 9th May, and was promised that an Engineer would call me back to test my line at 7pm on Tuesday 10th May. I'm sure that nobody is surprised to hear that we are still waiting for the call ...
Jo Green - Tue, 17th May 2011

Update : Within 24 hours of this blog being uploaded and fed out to Twitter, Tumbit passed on a direct message that they had recieved (via Twitter) from Telefonica. The message basically apologised, and asked for my landline details so they could sort out the problem for me and get back to me straight away. That was over two and half weeks ago....

Jo Green - Wed, 30th Mar 2011
Hmmm... judging by comments on this blog, (and in the forum) there seems to a distinct lack of anyone leaping to defend Telefonica !!
Gordon Collins - Sun, 20th Mar 2011
We have also had massive problems with telefonica and despite my OH being Spanish they are still crap. The first thing they did was try and sell us imagenio, which they sent and I discovered, through geeky technical exploration, that they had reduced our bandwidth and the imagenio box was sucking most of that reduced bandwidth in producing it's very poor quality compressed picture. It took a lot of shouting to get that reversed, but we are still paying for 10MB and getting less than 5. Now that we are moving countries (and told them to stop the contract next month) I have noticed a very large latency through their network. It seems that we have been put on a network throttleing list. What do you do in that situation? Tell them you are going to leave?!?!
Jasonwd - Sun, 20th Mar 2011
I'm not surprised Mr Grumpy. I was first going to switch mobile service to Vodafone in February because they had a great offer for an iPhone4... then Movistar called me with a "counter offer" which sounded great but turned out to be totally false because THEY DIDN'T HAVE ANY PHONES. Meanwhile, Vodafone had one reserved there for me, and I stupidly went with the counter offer so lost the deal and the phone. Last week I got another offer from Vodafone so went for it, no questions asked.
Azahar-sevilla - Sat, 19th Mar 2011
This weeks news : Telefonica lost a total of 59'000 Mobile Phone clients alone in January of this year. Can't be many more to go now ....
Mr Grumpy - Sat, 19th Mar 2011
OMG, this is all so familiar. I recently moved and getting my Movistar service transferred was a nightmare - hours of my life were wasted on useless phone calls to rude and incompetent operators. This week I've switched to Vodafone for adsl and my mobile phone, and to Digital for my tv service. I reckon on saving at least 50-75 euros a month.
Azahar-sevilla - Sat, 19th Mar 2011
Oh I so agree! Those adverts on English TV grieve me too! We transferred to Spantel a few years ago. Can't say it saves us much but they have a very competant and helpful English speaking technical dept. Was a lifesaver when our internet was down due to a fault at the Telefonica exchange. Spantel dealt with Telefonica and it was resolved relatively quickly. If I'd had to deal with them as an individual I think we'd still be offline now!
Dena - Thu, 17th Mar 2011
I recently changed over from Telefonica to Telitec. My only question now is why didn't I do it sooner? The whole process was seamless, Telitec are great to deal with and its cheaper. Phone Telitec on 965743473 and tell them I sent you! David Goodall
David Goodall - Mon, 14th Mar 2011

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