A Timeline of Complaints
2004-11-08 I sign up for Freebox, a three-in-one killer ADSL package that includes Voice-over-IP, a hundred television channels and 8 megabits-per-second internet access. Since I’ll have the VoIP line, I subscribe for dégroupage totale, which means that I don’t need to pay for a France Telecom line, saving 15€ a month!
2004-11-15 My France Telecom line goes dead. This is the night that I’m waiting for a call to let me know why I was evicted. I end up figuring this out and heading to the phone booth.
2004-11-19 Free.fr (the business that supplies Freebox) claims to have hooked up the DSLAM on the other end of the phone line. I don’t know this, because they inform me by email.
2004-11-20(ish) I receive my Freebox ADSL modem by signed courier. Hooray. It doesn’t work, however. According to the documentation, there isn’t a DSLAM on the other end.
2004-11-25 I receive a letter saying that I can hook up the modem and everything is set to go. Hooray. It doesn’t work, however. According to the documentation, there isn’t a DSLAM on the other end.
2004-11-27 I go over to Frédéric’s house to test my Freebox on his line (he uses the same service). It recognizes the DSLAM on the other end of his line.
2004-11-29 At work, I write a carefully composed email explaining the problem and send it off to the email address from the documentation.
2004-11-30 I receive a reply, saying that “to better serve their customers”, they aren’t answering email at that address any more, and you need to submit the problem online through the FAQ. I spend a half hour finding the hidden form for technical support, and submit my question.
It fails to go through, because I don’t have a Free.fr email address. I sign up for a Free.fr email address and submit my question, after rewriting it to fit in the 700 character limit.
2004-12-02 I receive the reply. They’ve copy-and-pasted the FAQ through which I had to navigate to submit my problem.
2004-12-05 I call their toll-full technical support number (at 0.34 € a minute). The first five times, they regret to inform me that they cannot take my call because of call volume (fortunately not charged). The sixth time, they inform me that I will be charged to be placed on hold indefinitely — I give up fairly quickly.
2004-12-07 I send an email to the billing department asking that they not charge me for the current month of lack of service. It bounces. I resubmit the tech support email through the same form, asking them to please read it and not respond with the FAQ.
2004-12-09 I get a response to my email, saying that they can’t process my request without the MAC address for the Freebox.
As a bit of technical information, a DSLAM is a multiplexer that sits attached to the other end of the twisted pair copper wire that leads into your house. It aggregates many customers DSL signals into a single high-speed line that goes to the public Internet. I have no doubt that, were a DSLAM present, it might do something interesting such as filter my traffic based on the MAC address of the Freebox.
However, the fact is that neither of my DSL modems can detect the presence of the DSLAM on the other end at all. My MAC address is irrelevant. Irrelevant, I say.
2004-12-10 I send off the MAC address of the Freebox ADSL modem. Normally, a MAC address is written as “00:7C:89:4D:7D:1E”. If you’d like to hide it, you would write “007C894D7D1E” and label it as “Serial Number”.
2004-12-11 It’s my dad’s birthday!
2004-12-13 TODAY. No phone line. No Internet. Expecting to be billed for November, December, January, and then a 96€ cancellation fee. I have little or no hope of getting any broadband to my house before I have to move.
The fun part is that the cancellation fee is refundable if you re-subscribe to Freebox after moving. It involves shipping the modem back with the cancellation fee, re-subscribing to Freebox and then submitting a reimbursement form with 1) the last month of your France Telecom and Freebox bills at your old place and 2) the first month of your France Telecom and Freebox bills at your new place.
So if I never get billed for a service that I never received, I can’t be reimbursed for the cancellation fee.
UPDATE: 2004-12-14 I get a response asking me for the exact state of the LED on my modem, but no way to respond. This information was in the previous email. I relaunch the technical support request.
GKarlsen
Holy Smokes!!!
I can fix this…honest.
What you do is catch a train, bus, or horse-drawn carriage that is heading south. Keep going until you can look out of the windown and see farmers.
Once you can see farmers exit your mode of transportation and wait until dark.
Once it is dark – and here is the only tricky part – you have to invade a farm. Beware of the cows, people tell you that they sleep and are available for tipping late at night but I can tell you from personal experience that they will stampede your ass if you go anywhere near them after sunset. Anyway, being careful to avoid the bovine ass stompers, find yourself a tractor.
Then, drive back to Paris in said tractor. Now, drive to the offices of Freebox. At this point the CEO of Freebox will come outside and beg you to allow him to sort out the terrible misunderstanding.
That’s the way it works in France, everyone is scared to death of tractors. I think possibly it is because the French know how dangerous cows really are and realize that the farmers control of the cows makes them a formidable political force and somehow tractors are like a magnifying glass that make farmers look bigger and more intimidating. (Very confusing I agree but you would be hard pressed to come up with a satisfactory rebuttal to this outrageous claim.)
So, there you have it, a solution.
I look forward to seeing your picture on the front page of “Le Monde” tomorrow, or Wednesday if you can’t make it out of Paris tonight.