So finally Bluewin, Swisscom’s Broadband unit, is offering BlueWinTV (TV via DSL) after announcing it about two years ago. The package gives us much more selection than we get through CableCom our cable provider. It includes 100 channels in mainly German, French, Italien and English and of course movies on demand starting at 3.50 CHF and live sports events at 1.00 CHF each. They are just in time as well as Cablecom, one of their largest competitors offering TV, phone and internet via cable, announced that they were going to upgrade our entire region to their digital network.
We decided to give BlueWin TV a try and placed our order last week. Just a couple of days ago we received our new VDSL modem as this is the technology Swisscom decided to go with, to stream two separate channels into our living room at 8Mbit each. They are not yet letting us use the bandwidth for our normal surfing yet but I did notice a slight increase in spead. Our 3.5Mbit subscription is giving us speeds of 3.75Mbit.
Swisscom did say that they would be allowing customers to surf at higher speeds using VDSL in 2007 so we are looking forward to that.
Unfortunately the change over wasn’t completely without glitches as for some reason the “automatic” change took from last Monday around noon until this evening to complete. During this time I called Bluewin on average twice a day. Their helpdesk is very polite but just not very helpful. Everytime I called they told me something different - ranging from: “I promise it will work tomorrow” to “It could take up to 7 days”. Just doesn’t build a lot of confidence in their product. Having to explain to each person from scratch what my problem was and having them run through their standard troubleshooting steps which I had already done 5 times before calling them didn’t really help either.
I always find it hard being a very technical person and working in end user services myself and calling a help number like that. I haven’t found out yet how to tell them that I am not a 12 o’clock flasher.
However I have found they at least give me the feeling that they are interested in my problem. Not like when I called Verizon Avenue in the US and always seemed to end up with the same guy who sounded like it was always a real bother to have to answer the phone and help others with their problems. But that’s a different story.
Posted by: Andy
Categories:
Andy
Technology
