ADSL24 C&W LLU ISP dropouts

For the last 1-2 years I've been using an ISP called ADSL24 who offer a month to month contract for internet and decent bandwidth etc. I'm at the end of a fairly long line though, so when the chance to move onto their LLU C&W service came up in December 2009 I jumped at the chance. Unfortunately, the LLU service brought nothing but misery and proved to be completely unusable; constant dropouts, low speeds and a completely and utterly ineffectual support team who take weeks to reply to tickets and who didn't offer any answers whatsoever!

From the move in late November, my first ticket was on 1st December to alert ADSL24 to the fact that my router couldn't hold a connection and had to be restarted every few minutes - not very good for someone who builds websites and web applications! The answer was to wait until it balanced itself out and that a fault couldn't be raised with BT until after 10 days.

Ten days later, it was still unusable so I contacted ADSL24 again. They logged a fault with their supplier and two days later came back with a cut and pasted set of questions asking all kinds of details about times of dropouts, possible electrical devices that could be interfering etc. I then started keeping a log of all dropouts in a spreadsheet, and of course also replied saying that it was strange that the faults coincided with the change to LLU and was fine before hand - this surely meant that it couldn't be an interference issue at our end? Changing sockets with the router didn't work, and the dropouts in my spreadsheet were going ballistic. I was also using one of the recommended compatible routers for their service.

This was all taking a very long time of course - at one point a ticket took 15 days for ADSL24 to respond to! By the New Year, it was no better and I requested my MAC code. I asked if there was a possibility to move back to Entanet. Ten days later, ADSL24 responded to this by saying yes, but it would cost me another connection fee. I then used my MAC code and moved to another ISP...

...whaddya know, upon moving to another provider, the dropouts stopped, the connection wouldn't drop every time the phone rang and I was getting faster speeds. In other words, all this uncertainty about it possibly being something to do with a fault in my house was rubbish - the same setup was working perfectly with another ISP!

I pointed this out to ADSL24 and requested that they should consider refunding me at least the connection/setup fee for moving to LLU as I could now prove it was a fault at their end. I made this request on 21st Jan. On 22nd Jan, they closed my ticket without a reply. I reopened the ticket only to find that they've closed it again today, again without a reply!

I know their answer, if I get one, will be that their provider charges them a fee, so they can't offer a refund. The answer to that is of course that they should be offering refunds to their customers and then chasing their suppliers for a refund in turn! This is what I've done in the past when a customer had some nasty problems with their web hosting - I refunded them a year's hosting fees even though I only lease the server myself so it was out of my hands. I then chased my supplier in turn for a refund. You've got to respect your customer!

Anyway, looks like they're stonewalling me. So thanks ADSL24, for charging me for an unusable service, providing no support and no solutions and no refund and in fact not even honouring me with a reply to my refund request.

Have you used ADSL24? What were your experiences?