ONE not to TEL your mates (OneTel)

Member Name: somebodyrandom

Product:	OneTel
Date:	22/06/04 (769 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Couple of quid cheaper than BT, You get to speak to the Indian farmers

Disadvantages: Customer services, Customer services, Customer services

'How would like bill thank you'- translated into what we know as English, means 'how would you like to pay for your bill?'

'Thank You' means 'please.'

and 'How may I please you' is not a chat up line of the local imported hooker, but actually translates to 'can I help you?'


Yep, its the English language, pure and simple in all of its glory. I don't ask for much, no complicated or sophisticated words, not even the use of the passive subjunctive tense in the pluperfect passive form. No. Just plain simple words, which are neither taxing to say or taxing to understand. I'm sure thats how every one likes to speak when dealing with customer services for a company. I don't ask for a lot (still waiting for the porche, but the order must have been lost in the post). So there is only one question to ask (and I don't want any smart arses saying 'what's the meaning off life'- to them all I say is go and play with nearest electricity pylon). The question is, why the hell can't Onetel teach their customer service 'agents' (I prefer to think of them as failed/trainee receptionists) to speak English in a way that we can understand. More on the trainee receptionists later.

Onetel offer telephone, mobile and internet/broadband services to both personal and business users. Compared to BT their prices are cheap(er), but compared to other providers they are about the same. You can get unlimited calls for about thirteen pounds a month. Thats over ten quid cheaper than my BT option 3 you may ask.

(For those of you who have had/are having a hard day and may not be fully with it, that was your que to stand up and shout: 'thats over ten quid cheaper than BT!')

Have you done it yet? Good. Any person rude enough to be laughing at this present moment is luaghing at you, so feel free to blush and feel embarrassed about know.

Anyhow
, to answer that statement, the answer is youv'e been tricked, so ha ha ha dunce alert, dunce alert etc. Yes you only have to pay Onetel thirteen quid, but you STILL NEED TO PAY THE BASIC LINE RENTAL OF £9.99 A MONTH TO BT. So it only works out about two quid a month cheaper, which as you will see is not woth the trouble.

(ps any body reading this who is 'of an upper class' and would not be seen dead having, yet alone using one of those extremely common and ever so dirty BT lines, so instead has to use a posh cable service, I have one thing to say. Blue bananas. Know go and get your butler to read this for you- you might be in danger of reading somethng a commoner has read).

Back to the main subject. You can either choose to dial a prefix before every number you call, or get a box to do it for you. (I mean a box that Onetel provide and is packed full of wires etc- not an old shoe box that you can then transform in a Blue Peter style and pull out, declaring 'here's one I made earlier.'). They will deliver it for free and so thats no problem- unless there is a postal strike, or Bush accidentally presses the red button and the world suddenly ends with a big bang.

The quality of the phone line is the same as with BT, but when you get fed up talkin to someone you could alw ays st art to b rea k u p your wor ds an d s ay th e li ne is fau lty du e to on et el. But why would you want to do that?

A plus for Onetel (yes, a goodpoint is about to be made, so brace yourselves), they do offer free directory enquiries. Woohoo!!!!!! But alas, there is a downfall, which is that their directory enquiry service is just as bad as all of the others that are around, so instead of paying for rubbish, you get it free.

Onetel also offer pay monthly mobile deals. Nothing special, just the same as all the other companies, join now and you get three months half price line rental, as well as the latest phones for free. To get
to the point, who cares? So does everywhere. So does every company. So does every mobile phone shop. Point made. Lets move on.

Internet by Onetel. They are the cheapest company if you just want simple pay as you go dial up internet, charging one and a half pence per minute. (Not only do they speak a different language, they also use a different currency- the half pence!). However, they are not very good at letting their customers know about price changes, they increased the price from one pence to one and a half pence without telling anyone- the fact that they wouldn't have told usin English anyhow we will ignore for the sake of simplicity. It doesn't sound much, but it adds an unexpected 50% to the bill. You wouldn't go and buy a car for ten thousand, and then let the company charge you fifteen thousand for it, would you? If you answered yes to the above, I told you what to do before, so go do it.

They also offer unlimited packages for a set fee each month (current prices www.onetel.co.uk/internet), ranging from anytime, during peak and during off peak hours. They also do a 'night owl' package, for four pound a month you get unlimited internet access from 10pm to 8am every day (well, night).

Broadband packages are the ame as the other companies, so I wont go into it. Prices are more or less the same, but the customer services are not worth any saving you might make.


So what is so bad about the customer services? Well, they are based overseas (my guess is India). The people they employ are not, should we say, linguistically advanced in English. Therefore not only can you not understand what they say, but they can't understand what you say, so to try and make a point takes a lot of effort. I even resorted to spelling out words to find out why our bill was so big.

'H-o-w m-u-c-h a-r-e w-e b-e-i-n-g c-h-a-r-g-e-d p-e-r m-i-n-u-t-e f-o-r t-h-e i-n-t-e-r-n-e-t?'

'Tirty pound.&
#39;

The correct answer would have been one and a half pence per minute, but we can't expect too much from them can we!.

Setting up our account was just as much of a hassle, fifth time lucky for them to get our surname right- slowly does it. Don't even start on trying to get technical support. 50p a minute to start with, when you spend at least 50seconds per minute trying to understand what they are saying.

I could go on for ages about the dire state of customer services, but why waste my breath. If you haven't got the point by know, give up, go home, go to bed, never wake up.

Anyway, to conclude, Onetel are a mediocre company in terms of products, but fail miserably when it comes to customer services.

Summary: