I thought I’d share this with you all in case you’re in the same situation as we are.

Looking at our Sierre Energie bill for last month I was struck by how high the internet/phone charge is, it’s been the same level since we took the service a few years back. The service isn’t very good, our phone quality is appalling and I’ve found skype is now giving us better outbound call quality and the internet speed is very patchy.

I think we get a 5mb upstream and 300k downstream, you can get an idea of what that ought to cost here :

http://www.comparis.ch/telecom/adsl/adsl.aspx?id=TC_PG_ADSLstandard

Sierre Energie are actually charging me 69 chf per month (or 89 including phone) and claim they’re delivering 5000/500. The speed claim is untrue.

What seems to have happened is they’ve upgraded their offerings and left old customers on higher tariffs for the same service. So we’re being charged 69 chf per month for a service that a new customer would pay 46 chf for.

I’m not sure how long this has been going on for but the overcharging is really quite high. I’ve complained to them and they’re offering to alter our service to the cheaper service but seem not to understand they need to give us the money back.

I suspect they find people owning chalets and apartments a fairly easy target and assume a lot of foreign owners won’t notice or be able to take any action. However, Switzerland has a telecom’s ombudsman and a fairly straightforward system for small legal claims. I also suspect they’ve not realized yet that I actually live here and probably assume I don’t know about the federal ombudsman or don’t know how the system works.

I’m going to give them a couple more chances and see if they grasp I’ll not be fobbed otherwise I’ll make a formal complaint to their regulator.

In the meantime, if you’ve the same service, you might want to check your bill. I’ll probably take it a bit further and stick a poster or something up locally to get other people aware of this.

For me this is pretty dishonest and not a lot more than fraud.

Updates

2009-10-02

I actually have a copy of our original contract with NetPlus for the Internet, it’s only a single page but it very clearly shows we subscribed to 5mb/300k. When I’ve contacted NetPlus/Sierre Energie their defense is that our contract is for 5mb/500k and they’ve subsequently introduced a new service at 5mb/300k which is cheaper. I’ve measured our speed regularly and it’s 5mb/300k, or really about 4,8mb/290k in fact. So we’re getting just what we contracted for which is fine.

Even so, that’s not much of a defense, it looks pretty cynical at the very least to leave customers on an old tariff with minor, basically cosmetic, differences to justify a higher price. What happens at the other house where we have SwissCom DSL via ISDN is that they move us up the product line at the same price point. So, I pay what I paid a few years back for a much quicker service, I could reduce that bill by keeping the speed back at the original level and take advantage of the lower price but by default SwissCom keep their charge the same which is fair enough. If NetPlus/Sierre Energie had done this we’d be getting 20mb/1mb at the moment.

I sent this contract to them and they’re pretending not to understand the problem, I reckon this is standard procedure, as I commented above they think they’re dealing with non-Swiss, non-residents and presume you’ll give up if they keep you locked in a pointless back and forth. I’ve given them until the end of the day now to sort it out or I’ll make an official complaint.

In truth, I don’t imagine for a moment they’ll sort it out and I’ve already contacted OFCOM to start an official complaint. The is a good system, there’s a number of organizations who aren’t answerable to anyone and behave as though they’re not.

aka, plagiarism and how it works….The sad news of the death of a skier while involved in a film project was carried earlier by The Salt Lake Tribune and the abc4.com website. Hers’s what abc4.com said

But today they said he took a bad line coming down a mountain called Wolverine Bowl and landed on an exposed rock face instead of the soft snow……..Search and rescue crews loaded Poole onto a back board and then into a helicopter but officials at the University of Utah Hospital said that Poole died at 1:30 pm, about two hours after the accident occurred.        

A few hours later the story is “reported” by Snowheads.com using their tried and tested technique of Googling for news stories with the word ski in them and copying them :

A professional extreme skier died yesterday in Utah doing stunts for a Warren Miller film. Billy Poole died when he took a bad line coming down a mountain between Solitude and Brighton ski resorts and landed on an exposed rock face instead of the soft snow. Search and rescue crews helicoptered him to hospital. But, officials at the University of Utah Hospital said that he died at 1:30 pm, about 2 hours after the accident occurred.     

The original sources of the story are mentioned and links provided but hardly any effort’s been made to even rephrase the original story and no editorial comment or analysis or contact made with original sources, just a straight piece of freeloading on someone else’s reporting. And then later, the Ski Club of Great Britain obtains the same scoop: 

He was doing stunts in the area between Solitude and Brighton ski resorts, and died after taking a bad line coming down the mountain and landing on an exposed rock face instead of the soft snow.Search and rescue crews helicoptered him to hospital but officials at the University of Utah Hospital said that he died at 1:30 pm, about 2 hours after the accident occurred.     

In an further piece of irony, Snowheads now complain that the Ski Club hasn’t linked to them as the (obvious) source of their story although they carried a text line acknowledging this, the hierarchy of etiquette involved in copying stories from the Internet and their subsequent recopying by equally lazy websites is apparently more complex than the casual observer might imagine.

After a couple of years with my old hosting provider I’ve decided it’s time for a move. The new provider is BlueHost.com who get very good reviews elsewhere and offered all the services I needed.

It’s actuallly worth considering for a lot of people to have their own hosting, for example BlueHost are able to host my domains (snowslider.net and snowslider.net) providing upto 2500 email accounts on those domains, webmail, 50gb of space, FTP access and a whole array of other services. This is ideal for hosting and sharing photographs of course. At $6.95 per month this is a real bargain.