Lukas Beeler's IT Blog

After this weekends cablecom hispeed business fiasco, i talked with cablecom about offering us a more reliable service.

Our current cablecom hispeed business line is ADSL2+ with 20/2 megabits. While the upstream is too low for my taste, i haven’t really seen better offers.

I talked with a sales on the phone – for about 200 CHF more, we could get 20/2 SDSL (which sounded strange) and a 20/2 DOCSIS backup line, together with a “Bronze” level SLA. This sounded very attractive to me and i told the sales to send me the offer.

In the written offer, the ominous 20/2 SDSL was downgraded to 4/4 SDSL (which made much more sense). Of course, downgrading our internet connection from 20/2 to 4/4 seemed like a rather bad idea. We have about 30 people working here everyday, and almost all of them really use the internet to do their job. We’ve upgraded from 6/.6 ADSL to the current cablecom connection, because 6 megabit downstream wasn’t fast enough.

So i asked what else they could offer us – for 500 CHF more than we pay today, we could get 8/8 SDSL with a 20/2 DOCSIS backup. That still didn’t sound interesting to me.

I, personally, think 1000 CHF per month would be okay for a redundant 20/20 connection or something in this direction. My current connection at home is 25/2.5 – for 75 CHF a month. It works well enough, and the last failure i had was fixed in three days. Just like the failure we had on our 500 CHF per month 20/2 connection. This should be a telltale sign that something is very wrong with either the pricing or the service level.

The next question i asked if they could do a 20/2 ADSL with a 20/2 DOCSIS backup. Apparently, that’s not technically possible right now, but they might introduce this later this year. That sounds attractive to me.

All in all, i still think that cablecom hispeed business sucks. They can’t be bothered to do a 5 minute fix in a 2 hour time window on Friday evening. Then, they make one ludicrous offer that noone can take serious after the other.

I’m pretty sure that cablecom doesn’t really understand what small businesses need.

As a side note, if you work for an ISP and think you can make us a better offer than cablecom, i’d be very much interested. Send your stuff to l dot beeler at acommit dot ch. We will be moving to Horgen/ZH at Seestrasse 202 in March 2010 and need 32 static IP addresses.