IDNET - or 'IDNOT'

This is my first post here but I 'contribute' to a number of forums - so
I'm not entirely green. I am posting here as I often see people telling
the world how wonderful IDNET are but wonder, from my own experience, if
they can possibly be talking about the same company that provide our
business with DSL.

Early in 2010 we moved our business broadband from ZEN to IDNET. We held
a number of dsl and hosting accounts with ZEN and we would still be with
them but for their accounts team. Each month we sent different payments
by BACS for the various services, keeping them all separate.
Unfortunately ZEN were just not capable of dealing with this and they
would end up crediting the wrong amounts to the wrong accounts and then
sending out payment reminders. It was taking a number of hours every
month to get them to resolve this yet they did it every month without
fail. In the end we migrated our remote workers to TalkTalk, and moved
our office to IDENT - something I regret most days.

They were more expensive than ZEN but gave a little extra bandwidth and
had excellent reviews. I now suspect many of those to have been a
reasonably sophisticated and copious case of astroturfing.

The service was provisioned late and to this day we are charged a week
early - but we live with that. After a week we started to see
intermittent packet loss and unexplained short outages. Contacting IDNET
usually got a reply along the lines of 'nothing wrong here'. We continued
to live with that up until 22nd of July 2010, when suddenly everything
stopped.

The router had lost sync and was unable to re-establish a session with
IDNET. It would sync up and at the CHAP offer the username/password. This
resulted in a failure and reset with the sync dropping out - something
quite weird that I had not seen before. I tried a number of devices at
the demarcation point, all of which refused to connect to the provider.

This was my first need to call IDNET as a customer and was optimistic
when the call platform told me I was caller 2 in the queue with a wait
time of 2 minutes. Whilst the call was free, it was nearly half an hour
before it was answered by the female head of their tech support. She
initially misread the line logs claiming the fault to be months old but
corrected this and blamed it on 'a lack of coffee'. The call lasted
around 20 minutes and she was somewhat insistent that I was no longer
using the right username and password. it was fairly obvious we were not
going to get anywhere with the call so I suggested I would try another
device and call back if I could not clear the fault. With this I tried
devices with both older Connexant and AR7 chipsets, as well as some
modern offerings. Devices from Draytek, Cisco, Solwise, Linksys and Zoom.
They would all sync, none would connect to IDNET.

I switched over to our Virgin Cable backup (not ideal as all our public
ip's are routed to IDNET) but we had service. I pulled the plug on the
IDNET and hoped that it would clear some kind of stale session and I
would look at it later. Consequentially we were able to reconnect later
that evening, but the error rate was fantastic and throughput was almost
like working on a 9600 baud modem.

Cutting a very long story short (because a previous post detailing every
day of it here: http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.php?t...
resulted in a threat of potential legal action) it took 20 days to get
service restored - this with one of the directors, Simon Davies,
personally taking ownership of it for 10 or so of those days. Basically a
pair fault was cleared, but the line had been capped so low that
productivity was dire. What is important to note is that a director of
IDENT was unable to get this resolved for the best part of a month. Here
is a partial daily list of speed tests. The clued up will see when it was
finally fixed:

12/8/10 DL: 2166 Kbps profile: 2500 Kbps
11/8/10 DL: 2907 Kbps profile: 2500 Kbps
10/8/10 DL: 443 Kbps CR:2839/824 Kbps Profile: 4000 Kbps
09/8/10 DL: 424 Kbps CR:2999/907 Kbps Profile: 4000 Kbps
08/8/10 DL: 464 Kbps CR:4443/891 Kbps Profile: 4000 Kbps
07/8/10 DL: 464 Kbps CR:4467/891 Kbps Profile: 4000 Kbps
06/8/10 DL: 397 Kbps CR:4527/843 Kbps Profile: 4000 Kbps
05/8/10 DL: 382 Kbps CR:4491/856 Kbps Profile: 4000 Kbps
04/8/10 DL: 463 Kbps CR:4439/911 Kbps Profile: 4000 Kbps
03/8/10 DL: 392 Kbps CR:4443/891 Kbps Profile: 4000 Kbps
02/8/10 DL: 401 Kbps CR:4619/920 Kbps Profile: 3500 Kbps
01/8/10 DL: 296 Kbps CR:4619/920 Kbps Profile: 3500 Kbps

Throughout this period the line stats were pretty constant and consistent
with being about 4km off the frame:
SNR Margin (dB): 6.1 18.6
Attenuation (dB): 53.0 30.7
Output Power (dBm): 12.9 0.0
Attainable Rate (Kbps): 4052 752
Rate (Kbps): 3278 440

OK, so it took 20 days of daily chasing to get this 'fixed' - or very
nearly. This included two visitis by Openreach - one to change the D side
out, one to change the E side out - and lots of chasing. IDNET did refund
us for this month, but the hassle it caused us and the snails pace in
which it progressed were massive issues for a small business.

Despite a couple of minor blips it seemed to remain pretty good for
nearly a month with a profile of 2500kbps. That was until Saturday the
11th of September 2010 when at around 8am in the morning. it dropped out
again. After getting sync back the line had re-profiled to 750kbps and we
were back to struggling to work again. I tried to call IDNET but it was
Saturday and they don't 'do' weekends. I sent the director an email,
along witht he support team and it took until 12:30 today (the 13th of
September 2010) to get a response. This time the directory is blaming
'low energy light-bulbs' for the problem and has agreed to reset the
profile.

The short of it is this - any provider can get a fault to deal with which
can be troublesome. The sad truth is I have had to chase IDNET around
like a rabid hyena to get them to fix a fault. They have been rude,
obstructive and ignorant. In fact, they only changed tact and became
'helpful' when they realised the experience was being detailed day by day
on a busy forum.

I don't know how long my hell will last with them this month, but it
wears you down. If, as a customer, you are thinking of using IDNET as a
provider please don't make the mistake that I did in believing the
reviews that they were 'good'. They may be fine - like any other SP -
when things are going good, but when there is a fault I can put my hand
on my heart and say they leave a great deal to be desired.

"Barry On Surfin'" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message news:i6l2tm$4st$(E-Mail Removed)...
<snip>
> up until 22nd of July 2010, when suddenly everything
> stopped.
>
> The router had lost sync and was unable to re-establish a session with
> IDNET. It would sync up and at the CHAP offer the username/password. This
> resulted in a failure and reset with the sync dropping out - something
> quite weird that I had not seen before. I tried a number of devices at
> the demarcation point, all of which refused to connect to the provider.
>
> This was my first need to call IDNET as a customer and was optimistic
> when the call platform told me I was caller 2 in the queue with a wait
> time of 2 minutes. Whilst the call was free, it was nearly half an hour
> before it was answered by the female head of their tech support. She
> initially misread the line logs claiming the fault to be months old but
> corrected this and blamed it on 'a lack of coffee'. The call lasted
> around 20 minutes and she was somewhat insistent that I was no longer
> using the right username and password. it was fairly obvious we were not
> going to get anywhere with the call so I suggested I would try another
> device and call back if I could not clear the fault. With this I tried
> devices with both older Connexant and AR7 chipsets, as well as some
> modern offerings. Devices from Draytek, Cisco, Solwise, Linksys and Zoom.
> They would all sync, none would connect to IDNET.
>
<snip>

Obviously the CHAP connection is going to re-authenticate after a
loss of sync event, but it's the loss of sync that is the problem.
Perhaps if you stressed the intermittent loss of sync and not mentioned
login credentials etc. being a precursor, it would have focused their minds?

What was the POTS side of things doing during the problem?
Any line-drops, crackles or other noises?

--
Graham.

%Profound_observation%

On Mon, 13 Sep 2010 13:47:16 +0100, Graham. wrote:

> "Barry On Surfin'" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
> news:i6l2tm$4st$(E-Mail Removed)... <snip>
>> up until 22nd of July 2010, when suddenly everything
>> stopped.
>>
>> The router had lost sync and was unable to re-establish a session with
>> IDNET. It would sync up and at the CHAP offer the username/password.
>> This resulted in a failure and reset with the sync dropping out -
>> something quite weird that I had not seen before. I tried a number of
>> devices at the demarcation point, all of which refused to connect to
>> the provider.
>>
>> This was my first need to call IDNET as a customer and was optimistic
>> when the call platform told me I was caller 2 in the queue with a wait
>> time of 2 minutes. Whilst the call was free, it was nearly half an hour
>> before it was answered by the female head of their tech support. She
>> initially misread the line logs claiming the fault to be months old but
>> corrected this and blamed it on 'a lack of coffee'. The call lasted
>> around 20 minutes and she was somewhat insistent that I was no longer
>> using the right username and password. it was fairly obvious we were
>> not going to get anywhere with the call so I suggested I would try
>> another device and call back if I could not clear the fault. With this
>> I tried devices with both older Connexant and AR7 chipsets, as well as
>> some modern offerings. Devices from Draytek, Cisco, Solwise, Linksys
>> and Zoom. They would all sync, none would connect to IDNET.
>>
> <snip>
>
> Obviously the CHAP connection is going to re-authenticate after a loss
> of sync event, but it's the loss of sync that is the problem. Perhaps if
> you stressed the intermittent loss of sync and not mentioned login
> credentials etc. being a precursor, it would have focused their minds?
>
> What was the POTS side of things doing during the problem? Any
> line-drops, crackles or other noises?

It was fine Graham. No issues with it at all. After changing out the d/e
sides on separate visits IDNET decided it was a fault with RAMBO which it
took them the best part of a month to fix. Today, it is back, and the
best they can offer is:

"I can see from the BT side that the Noise Margin on your line has been
increased to 24dB which will have had the affect of reducing the
connection speed. This increase in Margin is due to electrical
interference on the line. .... nearby to the router or the phone wire in
the house that can be moved further away? Devices such as Sky boxes or
anything with a power supply can cause interference (especially low-
energy light bulbs)."

The answer being 'Nothing has changed, just like last time....'
GROAN.

[snip tale of woe]

> I don't know how long my hell will last with them this month, but it
> wears you down. If, as a customer, you are thinking of using IDNET as a
> provider please don't make the mistake that I did in believing the
> reviews that they were 'good'. They may be fine - like any other SP -
> when things are going good, but when there is a fault I can put my hand
> on my heart and say they leave a great deal to be desired.

Can anybody here comment on whether A&A have a better accounts department
than Zen?

--
Graham J

On Mon, 13 Sep 2010 14:19:31 +0100, Graham J wrote:

> [snip tale of woe]
>
>> I don't know how long my hell will last with them this month, but it
>> wears you down. If, as a customer, you are thinking of using IDNET as a
>> provider please don't make the mistake that I did in believing the
>> reviews that they were 'good'. They may be fine - like any other SP -
>> when things are going good, but when there is a fault I can put my hand
>> on my heart and say they leave a great deal to be desired.
>
> Can anybody here comment on whether A&A have a better accounts
> department than Zen?

I loved ZEN. If only they could sort out their admin side of things out
they would be pretty much unbeatable. Truth is, I'm just waiting for them
to offer FTTC on my local street DSLAM and IDNET will become a distant,
bad memory for me. I'm sad to say that. I so would have liked it to have
worked out with them, but the core service and product is rotten.

My advice (for the little it is worth) if you are with ZEN stick with
them. For all their minor warts their pricing and service is pretty damn
good.

"Barry On Surfin'" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:i6l2tm$4st$(E-Mail Removed)...
> This is my first post here but I 'contribute' to a number of forums - so
> I'm not entirely green. I am posting here as I often see people telling
> the world how wonderful IDNET are but wonder, from my own experience, if
> they can possibly be talking about the same company that provide our
> business with DSL.


Sorry to hear about the problems. I used to use IDNET 10 years ago and
found the service to be excellent. But that then and only on dialup. IDNET
have certainly enjoyed a good reputation in the past. I hope that it's not
going downhill.

"Barry On Surfin'" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:i6l7bd$gge$(E-Mail Removed)...
> On Mon, 13 Sep 2010 13:47:16 +0100, Graham. wrote:

>> What was the POTS side of things doing during the problem? Any
>> line-drops, crackles or other noises?
>
> It was fine Graham. No issues with it at all. After changing out the d/e
> sides on separate visits IDNET decided it was a fault with RAMBO which it
> took them the best part of a month to fix. Today, it is back, and the
> best they can offer is:
>
> "I can see from the BT side that the Noise Margin on your line has been
> increased to 24dB which will have had the affect of reducing the
> connection speed. This increase in Margin is due to electrical
> interference on the line. .... nearby to the router or the phone wire in
> the house that can be moved further away? Devices such as Sky boxes or
> anything with a power supply can cause interference (especially low-
> energy light bulbs)."
>
> The answer being 'Nothing has changed, just like last time....'
> GROAN.

Are you certain that there are no interference sources close to your line
because if there are, they are beyond the control of any ISP. The phone
line may sound clear but if there is local RF interference, it may not be
immediately apparent.

On Mon, 13 Sep 2010 15:02:40 +0100, Mr. Benn wrote:

> "Barry On Surfin'" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
> news:i6l7bd$gge$(E-Mail Removed)...
>> On Mon, 13 Sep 2010 13:47:16 +0100, Graham. wrote:
>
>>> What was the POTS side of things doing during the problem? Any
>>> line-drops, crackles or other noises?
>>
>> It was fine Graham. No issues with it at all. After changing out the
>> d/e sides on separate visits IDNET decided it was a fault with RAMBO
>> which it took them the best part of a month to fix. Today, it is back,
>> and the best they can offer is:
>>
>> "I can see from the BT side that the Noise Margin on your line has been
>> increased to 24dB which will have had the affect of reducing the
>> connection speed. This increase in Margin is due to electrical
>> interference on the line. .... nearby to the router or the phone wire
>> in the house that can be moved further away? Devices such as Sky boxes
>> or anything with a power supply can cause interference (especially low-
>> energy light bulbs)."
>>
>> The answer being 'Nothing has changed, just like last time....' GROAN.
>
> Are you certain that there are no interference sources close to your
> line because if there are, they are beyond the control of any ISP. The
> phone line may sound clear but if there is local RF interference, it may
> not be immediately apparent.

As certain as I can be. I have a buddy who is a BT SFI and he checked the
place out with some gizmo last month and gave it the all clear. The best
tool I personally have is a Roberts AM Radio and it is whisper quite. So
I'm really stumped.

It's the sudden and drastic changes that are suspicious. Once IDNET
resolved the issue last time round (20 days, fault with RAMBO in the end)
I enjoyed the speeds I had as a ZEN customer. There has also been
considerable 'pressure' to take FTTC from BT (and to a lesser extent
IDNET) and the 'conspiracy theorist' in me makes a bizarre connection to
the lack of local uptake of it as a product. That may be crazy talk, but
it coincides with local availability. Unless the vdsl is interfering with
us lesser mortals.

"Barry On Surfin'" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:i6ldue$bj3$(E-Mail Removed)...
> On Mon, 13 Sep 2010 15:02:40 +0100, Mr. Benn wrote:
>
>> "Barry On Surfin'" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
>> news:i6l7bd$gge$(E-Mail Removed)...
>>> On Mon, 13 Sep 2010 13:47:16 +0100, Graham. wrote:
>>
>>>> What was the POTS side of things doing during the problem? Any
>>>> line-drops, crackles or other noises?
>>>
>>> It was fine Graham. No issues with it at all. After changing out the
>>> d/e sides on separate visits IDNET decided it was a fault with RAMBO
>>> which it took them the best part of a month to fix. Today, it is back,
>>> and the best they can offer is:
>>>
>>> "I can see from the BT side that the Noise Margin on your line has been
>>> increased to 24dB which will have had the affect of reducing the
>>> connection speed. This increase in Margin is due to electrical
>>> interference on the line. .... nearby to the router or the phone wire
>>> in the house that can be moved further away? Devices such as Sky boxes
>>> or anything with a power supply can cause interference (especially low-
>>> energy light bulbs)."
>>>
>>> The answer being 'Nothing has changed, just like last time....' GROAN.
>>
>> Are you certain that there are no interference sources close to your
>> line because if there are, they are beyond the control of any ISP. The
>> phone line may sound clear but if there is local RF interference, it may
>> not be immediately apparent.
>
> As certain as I can be. I have a buddy who is a BT SFI and he checked the
> place out with some gizmo last month and gave it the all clear. The best
> tool I personally have is a Roberts AM Radio and it is whisper quite. So
> I'm really stumped.

A radio with LW and MW bands will cover a substantial portion of the DSL
signal spectrum so that would be a good way of checking. I must say, it's
unlikely to be RF interference but cannot rule it out. There is another
mechanism called blocking which could affect your modem in which out of band
signals at frequencies above the DSL spectrum could be desensitising the
modem but again, this is not something I've heard of before and would
imagine is uncommon.

Barry On Surfin' wrote:
> This is my first post here but I 'contribute' to a number of forums - so
> I'm not entirely green. I am posting here as I often see people telling
> the world how wonderful IDNET are but wonder, from my own experience, if
> they can possibly be talking about the same company that provide our
> business with DSL.
>
> Early in 2010 we moved our business broadband from ZEN to IDNET. We held
> a number of dsl and hosting accounts with ZEN and we would still be with
> them but for their accounts team. Each month we sent different payments
> by BACS for the various services, keeping them all separate.
> Unfortunately ZEN were just not capable of dealing with this and they
> would end up crediting the wrong amounts to the wrong accounts and then
> sending out payment reminders. It was taking a number of hours every
> month to get them to resolve this yet they did it every month without
> fail. In the end we migrated our remote workers to TalkTalk, and moved
> our office to IDENT - something I regret most days.
>
> They were more expensive than ZEN but gave a little extra bandwidth and
> had excellent reviews. I now suspect many of those to have been a
> reasonably sophisticated and copious case of astroturfing.
>
> The service was provisioned late and to this day we are charged a week
> early - but we live with that. After a week we started to see
> intermittent packet loss and unexplained short outages. Contacting IDNET
> usually got a reply along the lines of 'nothing wrong here'. We continued
> to live with that up until 22nd of July 2010, when suddenly everything
> stopped.
>
> The router had lost sync and was unable to re-establish a session with
> IDNET. It would sync up and at the CHAP offer the username/password. This
> resulted in a failure and reset with the sync dropping out - something
> quite weird that I had not seen before. I tried a number of devices at
> the demarcation point, all of which refused to connect to the provider.
>
> This was my first need to call IDNET as a customer and was optimistic
> when the call platform told me I was caller 2 in the queue with a wait
> time of 2 minutes. Whilst the call was free, it was nearly half an hour
> before it was answered by the female head of their tech support. She
> initially misread the line logs claiming the fault to be months old but
> corrected this and blamed it on 'a lack of coffee'. The call lasted
> around 20 minutes and she was somewhat insistent that I was no longer
> using the right username and password. it was fairly obvious we were not
> going to get anywhere with the call so I suggested I would try another
> device and call back if I could not clear the fault. With this I tried
> devices with both older Connexant and AR7 chipsets, as well as some
> modern offerings. Devices from Draytek, Cisco, Solwise, Linksys and Zoom.
> They would all sync, none would connect to IDNET.
>
> I switched over to our Virgin Cable backup (not ideal as all our public
> ip's are routed to IDNET) but we had service. I pulled the plug on the
> IDNET and hoped that it would clear some kind of stale session and I
> would look at it later. Consequentially we were able to reconnect later
> that evening, but the error rate was fantastic and throughput was almost
> like working on a 9600 baud modem.
>
> Cutting a very long story short (because a previous post detailing every
> day of it here: http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.php?t...
> resulted in a threat of potential legal action) it took 20 days to get
> service restored - this with one of the directors, Simon Davies,
> personally taking ownership of it for 10 or so of those days. Basically a
> pair fault was cleared, but the line had been capped so low that
> productivity was dire. What is important to note is that a director of
> IDENT was unable to get this resolved for the best part of a month. Here
> is a partial daily list of speed tests. The clued up will see when it was
> finally fixed:
>
> 12/8/10 DL: 2166 Kbps profile: 2500 Kbps
> 11/8/10 DL: 2907 Kbps profile: 2500 Kbps
> 10/8/10 DL: 443 Kbps CR:2839/824 Kbps Profile: 4000 Kbps
> 09/8/10 DL: 424 Kbps CR:2999/907 Kbps Profile: 4000 Kbps
> 08/8/10 DL: 464 Kbps CR:4443/891 Kbps Profile: 4000 Kbps
> 07/8/10 DL: 464 Kbps CR:4467/891 Kbps Profile: 4000 Kbps
> 06/8/10 DL: 397 Kbps CR:4527/843 Kbps Profile: 4000 Kbps
> 05/8/10 DL: 382 Kbps CR:4491/856 Kbps Profile: 4000 Kbps
> 04/8/10 DL: 463 Kbps CR:4439/911 Kbps Profile: 4000 Kbps
> 03/8/10 DL: 392 Kbps CR:4443/891 Kbps Profile: 4000 Kbps
> 02/8/10 DL: 401 Kbps CR:4619/920 Kbps Profile: 3500 Kbps
> 01/8/10 DL: 296 Kbps CR:4619/920 Kbps Profile: 3500 Kbps
>
> Throughout this period the line stats were pretty constant and consistent
> with being about 4km off the frame:
> SNR Margin (dB): 6.1 18.6
> Attenuation (dB): 53.0 30.7
> Output Power (dBm): 12.9 0.0
> Attainable Rate (Kbps): 4052 752
> Rate (Kbps): 3278 440
>
> OK, so it took 20 days of daily chasing to get this 'fixed' - or very
> nearly. This included two visitis by Openreach - one to change the D side
> out, one to change the E side out - and lots of chasing. IDNET did refund
> us for this month, but the hassle it caused us and the snails pace in
> which it progressed were massive issues for a small business.
>
> Despite a couple of minor blips it seemed to remain pretty good for
> nearly a month with a profile of 2500kbps. That was until Saturday the
> 11th of September 2010 when at around 8am in the morning. it dropped out
> again. After getting sync back the line had re-profiled to 750kbps and we
> were back to struggling to work again. I tried to call IDNET but it was
> Saturday and they don't 'do' weekends. I sent the director an email,
> along witht he support team and it took until 12:30 today (the 13th of
> September 2010) to get a response. This time the directory is blaming
> 'low energy light-bulbs' for the problem and has agreed to reset the
> profile.
>
> The short of it is this - any provider can get a fault to deal with which
> can be troublesome. The sad truth is I have had to chase IDNET around
> like a rabid hyena to get them to fix a fault. They have been rude,
> obstructive and ignorant. In fact, they only changed tact and became
> 'helpful' when they realised the experience was being detailed day by day
> on a busy forum.
>
> I don't know how long my hell will last with them this month, but it
> wears you down. If, as a customer, you are thinking of using IDNET as a
> provider please don't make the mistake that I did in believing the
> reviews that they were 'good'. They may be fine - like any other SP -
> when things are going good, but when there is a fault I can put my hand
> on my heart and say they leave a great deal to be desired.


It sounds as though this was A BT issue, and frankly when its a BT
issue, any ISP can have a hard time making it work. At least IDNET took
some responsibility for it, and refunded you.

In short, if you think that was bad, wait till you have some support
droid on the other end, with other companies.