Nomad
I am not talking about the people who moves from places to places, not settling down for long in any specific area, although my life has been more like that lately.
Nomad is the internet service I have subscribed in Mauritius. Boasting 128kb/s adsl (a high figure for Mauritius) at slightly just under Mauritius Telecom’s (MT) price for similar debit rate, and mobility, I let myself be tempted with their service. Furthermore, they offered a novel way of connection, which is more of a wireless LAN than classical wi-fi, and I thought it good to encourage them.
After a month’s use, I must say I am hugely disappointed. From the beginning things didn’t go smoothly. I asked about their services on 31st Jan for their free 1st month offer. They said the offer was calendar month, and if I was to subscribe I would only get what’s remaining of 31st Jan free. Pleading about having the connection starting only on 1st of Feb or making an exception (it was already afternoon) was useless. Furthermore, not only February has only 28 days, but also Feb 1st is a public holiday here (Celebration of the abolition of slavery). So, I ended buying it on Feb 2nd.
Customer Service is not 24hrs, but that is to be expected in Mauritius. The first time I tried calling them during early morning (at 9am) to complain about poor network connection, no one picked up the phone. It was only around 9.45am that I finally got someone on the line. That is poor service. For me personally, they should work as from 8am (normal office time in Mauritius) or at least 9am (more of civil service starting time). Did I say that when I went to buy the “modem” the sellers only came to work well after 10am?
When I tried to explain my connection problems, all I got was the lady on the phone trying me to delete my previous connection network settings, including dial up ones, rebooting my laptop, checking several ip/dns etc… Some of them were reasonable but others had no sense. Oh well, the lady seemed to know even less about computer and connections to internet than me, reading what seemed to be a checklist of ways to answer comsumer queries.
I got no reasonable answer as to why the connection would keep being chopped - so many people have asked me why I keep logging in and out of msn messengers when it’s just connection problem (even when I am supposedly having network connection); why file transfers were practically impossible - low transfer rate then transfer just failed - on msn/yahoo messengers (I couldn’t bother talking about QQ, they probably never heard about it), …. The IT guy had the gut to tell me that maybe MT was blocking access at times as I signed up with its competitor, and that the msn/yahoo problems were surely from msn/yahoo themselves. Maybe that kind of lame excuses are acceptable by people who know nothing about computer, but I have been using computers and internet for more than a decade. When using MT’s dial-up I was able to have access and better downloads.
They were also not able to explain why my reception bar would often drop from 5-6 bars (out of maybe 9) to 0 (ZERO) every so often, and thereby losing connection. They asked for my number and address, promising to send a techinician to come and verify if there was a problem, but I never saw that guy nor did they call to excuse or follow up the problems.
So, Nomad sucks big time and I am afraid that I am forced to discourage every friend and relative I know from subscribing from them, even more so as the company won’t accept cancelling my subscription without the (never came to my house) technician’s report about reception problems.
Just want to add. I just now have spent about an hour trying to modify some stuffs on my site, but using Nomad, I kept having error messages such as server redirecting to wrong path, and cannot be connected. Fed up with it, I went to use MT’s dial up and, surprise surprise, within minutes finished all my modifications!
Posted: March 1st, 2006 under Web and IT.