By kiyawhite
on 28th Mar 2008
kiyawhite's Ratings| Reliability | 5/10  |
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| Customer Service | 4/10 |
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| Speed Consistency | 7/10 |
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| Value for money | 4/10 |
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| Overall value | 6/10 |
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 kiyawhite's recommendation |
Good Points
>All customer service representatives are friendly
>If you have a fault a BT engineer will almost immediately be arranged without hassle
>A generous usage cap compared to some other providers
>Good content
Bad Points
>When you make contact with AOL very little notes are made of what's discussed so if you follow up a story you'll end up having to re-explain everything in my experience
>Intermittent connection faults are very rarely repaired in my opinion!
>Possibly a bit pricey for me since other ISPs offer the same thing at a lower price as far as I am concerned?
General Comments
I have been an AOL customer for seven years, which I think is quite a long time. I began in 2001 with AOL dialup then in 2002 upgraded to AOL Broadband Silver (512kbps). Later my speed was upgraded to 1mbps, then 2mbps. In 2007 I changed over to the new package offered by AOL now that it had been overtaken by The Carphone Warehouse: AOL Wireless.
I have been 86% satisfied with AOL's service to me in that I've been happy with my internet connection for six out of the seven years they've provided me with it.
AOL's staff are trained to be very pleasant. The Irish staff are certainly the best in my opinion; that's partly because they've got great accents but also because they talk proper English. But I don't mean to demean the Indian staff because taking all factors into account they are very friendly and calm people who really try their hardest to meet your needs.
If I'd been writing this review before May 2007 I would be giving AOL nine or even ten out of ten as an overall rating - but it's not before the May 2007 so that's why I've given a rating of 6...
In May 2007 it became clear to me that I had a fault on my BT line. The problem is intermittent and when it is there my router cannot synchronize with my exchange at all. This was very, very annoying. To cut a long story short, between May and November 2007 I had 5 BT engineers call at my home in total to attempt to rectify my line fault. Were any successful? No. Except in November I went 2 days without the fault occurring to I received contact from AOL to tell me the fault had been cleared, so I decided to celebrate by upgrading to AOL Wireless from my previous AOL Silver 2mbps subscription. But as soon as the upgrade took place I was greeted with loads of occurrences of my line fault. During the 10 day establishment period of ADSL Max I experienced loads and loads of disconnections and periods where a sync couldn't be established. For those of you that know how ADSL Max works that left me with a terrible speed... my current downstream bandwidth, set, it 0.8mbps out of a possible 8mbps! So Terrible! I wrote a letter of complaint. I was happy now that I got my very own AOL complaints manager. He tried very hard to get the fault rectified... sending out many more engineers. But in the end he basically said "I give up. I'll get you out of your new contract and get you a MAC code upon request so that you can try another provider because AOL can't do anything else for you." Fair enough, I thought. So, I find my new provider: Sky. I get my MAC and hand it over. Then I get an email from AOL saying 'Note that you've used this MAC whilst still in a legally binding contract with AOL. You may be charged for exiting this contract.' A conversation with an AOL Live Help clerk clarified that the AOL customer system said I was in a contract until August 2009 and that if I was to leave I would be charged something like £200 to cover remaining charges. That person could see no mention of me being released from the contract. So, I phoned AOL up. The supervisor I spoke to said he'd put a note on my account to say I'm out of the contract. The following day I wanted to clarify this had happened so I went back to AOL Live Help to ask if I could change ISP and I was told 'you're still in a contract.' Grr. I got in contact with my complaints manager who told me that he would have to see to it personally that I wasn't charged when I left AOL as long as I told him as soon as the migration of connection had taken place (so now I'm watching my connection speed for a change really, really closely and waiting for notification from Sky).
But AOL was great before then. The content is super for the price, particularly when you come across all the content that is exclusive to AOL. I hear that AOL's customer connections are usually stable and give good bandwidth so ignore my problems! Just make sure that you don't choose AOL if you have any current broadband line issues because there's little chance of these getting fixed by AOL.
I'll miss AOL, but I look forward to a new future with Sky. If my line fault is still present with Sky I think I will just have to give up trying to get rid of it and enjoy how cheap Sky's broadband packages are after all.
