I regret the day...

Miscellaneous Forums/General Discussion/I regret the day...

I ever joined Bulldog Broadband.

Trust me people. This company/ISP is so crap that I don't think theres a bad enough word to describe them.

Today they debited from my account £275 for one months worth on Broadband Internet access. The connection since it was installed has been disconnecting twice a minute and never stops. Technical support staff were imported from the jungles of the Amazon as only Apes and Monkey brains seem to man the Bulldog Tech lines.

I called the billing Dept and asked why I had been charged so much money and was told that it was a standard charge for the Bulldog service. I pointed out how ridiculous what I had been told sounded then the line went dead. I call back and speak again to Billing and was told it was an administartion charge. Are you serious?, I said. I was put on hold for 30 minutes then when someone finally got back to me I was told that it was an error with Billing and that I would get my money back. Lets hope.

Next step was to sort out the disconnection. I call up Tech support and wait 1 hour in a queue. When I finally get through I describe the disconnections and the solution I'm given is to contact my ISP. I said you are my ISP. I @#!* you not. I was put on hold for 5 minutes then Tech support came back and said that my line couldn't handle the 8MB service. He said he would reduce it to 4MB. I now have a 4MB connection that disconnects every minute and stays disconnected for quite a while. I call up Tech support again and again tell them I'm getting diconnected. I was put on hold for 10 minutes and when someone got back to me I was told that my line couldn't handle the 8MB service and that it would be reduced to 4mb. I explained that they'd already reduced me to 4mb and that it didn't solve the problem.

You know what? I could go on typing to tell you the whole story but I really can't be arsed. Bulldog are @#!*.

You have been warned.

This is not the first time you have mentioned that you have had problems with them.

I think it best that you catalogue a full list of problems you have had with them - like you have above - and email watchdog@.... Or, write to Watchdog, PC Zone, Future Publishing, 99 Baker Street, London, W1U 6FP. "Suzy Wallace" will take them on for you - she's 26 and quite tasty too.

Thanks Puki. I think I'm going to have to go down that route. It's not the first time they've over charged me and billed me £200 odd pounds for their services.

I'm currently looking at Telewest brodband for services. If they can get me a cable connection I'll go with it. If not, I think I'll be cancelling my bulldog service and going with another ISP.

Do you have a lot of cable boxes in your house? Each time you split the line, the signal gets weaker. You might need a signal booster of some kind.

Get rid of BD. No amount of complaining will get you anywhere with them (unfortunately). They have already been on Watchdog and have got Ofcom breathing down their necks. Ofcom recently cleared them of breaching acceptable guidelines, so you're not going to get anywhere with them.

They do not care about individual users. Everything about their organisation is designed solely to deal with 'swarms' of users. Tech support is a joke, sales are clueless and even their PR department are just totally unbelievable.

If you want anything faster than 2048/256, you are not going to get quality customer service. The only ISP I have got any time for are Zen. They have made a few errors, but they actually do care about you when you call. Their tech support people either can help you or can put you on to someone who has intimate knowledge of your hardware (not just following a script!).

Also, their internet service is fairly solid. A few problems recently, but that is all down to BT with over-congested exchanges (going to be worse now that people got ADSL for Christmas).

http://www.zenadsl.co.uk/

You could do a lot worse.

I had a similar problem here in Texas... Warner Cable had laid too long a line to my house using inferior wiring. It degraded in the ground and since they have had to rewire me about 6 times... The current wiring works at about 3kbps - 4.5kbps but no more. Speed suffered when the built apartments in the area (a block of flats) and connected them all in the the local server.

The more people connected to the area server the slower it is... All the teenagers in those apartments seem to want to do is limewire for MP3s (or porn) and it slows down to a crawl by 16:00 here!!! Does not speed up till midnight!!!