One has only to follow the various threads on this and other forums to realise that Telefonica is not the most loved of companies.
Indeed, I too have been known to don my Victor Meldrew hat from time to time but I have to admit that I have found their service generally to be pretty good.
On Saturday evening I lost my internet DSL connection; the phone was working satisfactorily so I didnt think to much about it, putting the breakdown down to the fact that we do occasionally suffer from breaks in service. We live out in the campo where all the main utilities are subject to occasional failures.
After two hours however we were still off line so with my English-Spanish dictionary to hand I phoned Telefonica’s DSL support line (902 357000) This is a Spanish Language only service and my Spanish is extremely limited. I spoke to a young lady who was incredibly patient with me as I stumbled through an explanation of my loss of service. She carried out a line check for me and told me there was no problem with the line and that therefore the problem must be in the house. She said she would report the problem to the Tech Support people.
24 hrs later and the same situation existed so I again contacted them and this time got a not quite so helpful operator who advised me that Tech Services had been advised and that they would be in touch.
On Monday afternoon I put on my Victor Meldrew hat and had a real good moan to my wife who is currently in the UK and obviously unable to do much to help, but who has a vested interest in our internet connection as she runs loads of websites. Ten minutes after hanging up, I had a phone call from a Telefonica engineer who needed to establish that I was indeed at home. He was about 15 minutes away from the house on his way to see me.
A cheerful chap…even when one of my dogs managed to empty her water bowl all over his feet…
He very quickly diagnosed a U/S Router and changed it and then set it up for me; something that I hadn’t been looking forward to since my computer only speaks Spanish…(Vista, purchased in Spain…). He was quite unable to help my other computer (English XP) which shares the DSL connection however and which would not acknowledge the presence of the DSL line. After he left I suddenly realised that if the IP address is changed on an XP driven computer it needs to be re-booted. This I did and it worked so we have two working computers again.
So thank you Telefonica! My only criticism would be that the job took 48hrs to accomplish, but I guess that would have been the same in the UK with BT. Once the work was completed I had no less than 5 calls from Telefonica asking if the job had been done and if so was it successful…little bit of overkill there but who’s counting!
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