Amazingly, Slovene national ISP Telekom (recently SIOL, my original ISP, was merged with Telekom) has really fulfilled the promise to bring fiber optics to my home. Actually, the infrastructure (cable) has been outside my doors for a month or so now. In the middle of the month I was wondering when I can get a connection already – FTTH 6Mb/6Mb would be of great benefit over ADSL2 2Mb/384Kb to me. So I called ISP’s sales center. The operator said that they are sending letters (not e-mails) to subscribers and once I get the letter I can upgrade (I am already on their ADSL2). I got the letter in a couple of days and I phoned them again asking, hey connect me. The operator (new one) said – we have to check whether you can get optics at all. After telling him that I sure can, since cable is right outside the doors, he told me that they are not connecting customers yet and that I should call later next month (May). Oh well, but the story doesn’t end here. Next day I was reading their forum and I saw a post from a guy saying that Telekom has already connected a bunch of customers in my city. I even found the news on the website that “first seven customers has been connected” and that they actually started fulfilling the promise. Go wonder. Of course I phoned the sales operator again (yet another one) who told me to apply for connection through their website and if anything goes wrong, I should call their support operator. So I went, filled a ton of data and clicked finish – just to get an exception of server error. This time I phones support and the guy I got told me that he can’t help me as he can’t even come close to this application of theirs and that I should call sales. See – I am already being pushed in recursion. OK, so I called sales and a new operator told me that they are experiencing problems with this application (which seems being used by them, too) and I should call them in an hour or so. Of course the application wasn’t working for a couple of days and a bunch of different sales operators told me to call later because they have no idea what’s wrong. Only after n-th call I got a sales operator that almost yelled at me: “What do you want? We are not selling optics yet, go away and return after we announce we are selling optics! And those seven guys who were connected were testers”. Yet, they have an application in place that lets you apply for optics (but it throws a seemingly unrelated exception later on), they announced that they started connecting customers (note: there was no mentioning of test connections, no, it was explicitly stated that they were connecting subscribers), they have a price list in place and 80% of sales operators told me that I can apply, it is just the application that doesn’t let me. And I can’t even apply for optics right now.
The bottom line is no optics for now and I can’t even apply for it. Perhaps in a month or less, who knows – apparently nobody. When it happens it happens. As for me, I have mixed feelings about optics: sure, the speed will be great, the stability should be better, the price should be lower but seeing how they are dealing with this makes me afraid of logical problems related. Needless to say, that my old ADSL2 modem needed a year of constant firmware upgrades to start working properly, at least more or less properly, IPTV has constant problems, IP phone quality is bad, etc. So I am bit in a dilemma whether to switch to optics right now, or wait for situation to stabilize (I guess the illogical part of me will prevail and I’ll jump on optics bandwagon as soon it is available).