KEY POINTS:
I've been ported, thwarted and rorted. After nearly three years of living dangerously, I've given up and gone back to the monopoly. I've had to accept reality. There is no telecommunications choice or competition in Auckland.
Why did I give up? Reliability. When you don't have dial tone, you realise how much it's taken for granted. When it worked, Wired Country's phone and broadband which I bought via iHug, and which flew back and forth through the air between my house and the Sky tower, was great.
For a while I enjoyed the cheapest service in town - $88 a month for a phone with call waiting, voicemail and caller ID, and a healthy 10GB a month of quite fast internet. But far too often the service didn't work.
The biggest pain and waste of time was trying to get the service fixed - an endless merry go round of help desk calls to ihug (now owned by Vodafone) and Wired Country (now owned by Compass Communications) each blaming the other for the outage.
And just when you thought the problems were over, the phone would fail again - invariably in the middle of my partner doing a radio interview or when she had a carefully teed up phone interview with an overseas star. One quickly developed dial tone paranoia, gingerly lifting the receiver and praying that beeeeeeeeh sound was there. How I cursed when it wasn't.
Enough was enough. Number portability came into effect on April 1, so at least I could keep my old number when I went back to the dark side. But the porting - from iHug to iHug - didn't go well. Once again I learned, how much we take dial tone for granted.
My number portability nightmare began when iHug, in its eagerness to switch me over from Wired Country to Telecom, kept cutting off my phone before the designated switch-over day. This was particularly inconvenient because a close relative was seriously ill in hospital and our phone line was vital for regular updates. When it first happened I rang iHug helpdesk, and when it became clear the frontline staff hadn't a clue, I escalated the call to a manager (let's call him Alen) who I had been dealing with in arranging the change. Alen had it fixed in a few hours, was extremely apologetic and refreshingly honest in admitting who was at fault. But when it happened a second time during the weekend and while we were waiting for a particularly critical call from the hospital, I saw red.
"I'm sorry but there is nothing I can do," said the man at the iHug helpdesk (let's call him Veejay), deaf to my explaining, cajoling, pleading and swearing.
"I'm sorry I can't do that," replied Veejay to my suggestion he escalate the problem to manager Alen. He seemed to think it was reasonable we would be without a phone for the rest of the weekend in the middle of a family crisis. By now I was weeping with frustration.
By sheer chance I found Alen's number in the phone book and rang him at home. Once again he was courteous, helpful and apologetic and had the problem fixed in an hour.
The day of the big switchover finally came. The Telecom contractor who reconnected the wires was polite, professional and a fine chap. But then we were saying hello to our old friend - the sound of silence. Although porting is supposed to happen almost instantly, in our case it took six hours before we could rejoin the network. Payback, no doubt for lambasting Telecom so often.
But the horror wasn't over. A few days later people calling us were once more getting "number not in service". I went straight to Alen, who for the fourth time got things sorted out and was relieved to report the problem was Telecom's.
But having survived porting horror, what really ticks me off is that my monthly bill is now $93 a month for the same phone with the same services such as voicemail, and although my internet is much faster, I'm limited to 5GB a month.
Proof positive that competition is dead. But at least, so far, the phone works.
