So I'm moving next week (on which more later). And I wanted to cancel my utilities. Onetel is all online, so I go to the webpage, and there's absolutely no way to cancel. You can change from one service to another, you can move your current service to a new address, but you can't (at least that I can find) stop using the service altogether. I can understand that they don't want to lose customers, but making it that hard to leave isn't the way to retain them.

Anyway, I write them an email explaining the situation and asking how I cancel the service. I get an automated reply saying, we got your message, we'll get back to you within 72 hours. Fair enough. A couple of days later, my dialup service just dies.

I phone their helpline to ask what's going on. I get an answer relatively quickly, but when I hear a sub-continent accent I have to admit my heart sinks. However, the call centre person turns out to be entirely competent and understands me better than I can understand her. There are a couple of complications to the issue, so she transfers me to someone else, again, quick and efficient transfer.

Anyway, it turns out that my email asking how to cancel my service from the 22^nd got, instead of an actual response, them simply cancelling my service on the 15^th. That's now sorted out and I have dialup access again until 24^th. So in some ways, very good customer service; they dealt with things quickly, and when there was a minor problem, a quick and painless phonecall resolved it. But in other ways, the whole issue could have been avoided if they'd just communicated with me instead of trying to second-guess what I wanted.

So yes, I recommend Onetel. This isn't the first time they've been helpful. They're not the cheapest out there but they're a lot less flaky than many cheap phone services. And frankly, they're a sight less flaky than BT who are big enough and charge enough money that they ought to do better.

Also, this is a test of the notorious tags. You might be able to see a message somewhere in this post noting that it's in the tag category of 'quotidian'. If you use the S1 style system you will see the tags only if you look directly at my journal or the comments page for this post. If you use S2 the tags should show up as the entry appears on your friends page. At least, I think that's how it's supposed to work.