Flow and its disreputable disservice

Dear Editor,

We have been without Internet and cable service from Flow since Tuesday, December 8, and, despite our best efforts, up to Sunday December 19, we are still without Internet and cable service.

We are prompted to write to you to see whether airing the matter publicly may provide any resolution. After all, it appears there are no service standards that are guaranteed to customers of Flow, or no sanctions that can be taken against them for their notoriously poor service, to which we can now testify.

We live in St Ann and lost the service on Tuesday, December 9. We started calling Flow on that Wednesday to report the loss of service. There is no point in stating the lengthy periods of up to 40 minutes we have spent waiting to get to talk to a representative.

When we made the first report the representative asked us to unplug the modem, etc. With no relief coming, he then said a technician would contact us in 24 to 72 hours. We were given a ticket or reference number.

In our subsequent calls, and providing the representative our ticket or reference number each time, we started asking about when we should expect a technician or a call. We kept hearing only that the matter had been “escalated”.

We kept calling though Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, every single day. On Friday, December 18, after 10 days without the service, a technician called. It was the first time anyone from Flow was calling us.

The technician came to our home. He spent less than five minutes and said no signal was coming to the modem, adding that he had to check the box on the road. We have not seen or heard from him since. We have again been calling Flow every day. We reported what happened with the technician.

On two occasions the representatives told us that if our service was out for more than 72 hours we would receive a credit — as if a discount was our issue, or should be in question.

In the meantime, because we do some work on the Internet from home, we’ve had to visit friends in neighbouring communities at least three different days to ‘borrow’ their service. Then we went to the added expense of putting an old Digicel modem in use and putting credit on it. That’s another story!

In speaking to friends from different parts of the country no one was surprised to hear of our travail. That says tons.

Perhaps we have missed or did not read the fine print, but surely it can’t be right for a paid service to be out for a week without a response from the provider.

It can’t be good enough, either, for Flow simply to provide a credit after three days without the service. People pay a rate calculated on the basis that the service will be available every day.

Of note, we had sent a letter to the Office of Utilities Regulation and they contacted us for some details. J Douglas St Ann jacklyndouglas@ymail.com