AOL Broadband Settling Time

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Well it would seem that it takes a few weeks for settling in time with AOL Broadband. The Fife based customer, who chose to upgrade from their dial-up access to silver and then onto gold broadband, has not contacted us for assistance for the last week. Thank goodness since every support incident has been an AOL system problem, something totally outwith the control of the customer or RSL.

The last occurence, which we haven’t blogged on yet was interesting. The customer phoned AOL to be told that the router wasn’t one of the supported ones and was not correctly configured. Further the support representative sent him a copy of Ad-Aware SE, informing the customer that this would fix their problem!

Luckily we were passing the customer’s door that afternoon. One of our support engineers popped in and spoke with an AOL support person. Our engineer retold the story of the customer’s experience earlier that morning and started to query the obvious holes in the sequence of events. The AOL support representative was very knowledgeable and within a minute confirmed the router settings were 100% correct, before going on to admit the earlier problem was in fact down to something called “an Affinity Bit” being incorrectly configured. Once again the problem lay in the systems of AOL.

As for the Ad-Aware SE, the customer hadn’t run it all the way through to remove any adware, spyware or related nasties. This means we found them in the same state as when he couldn’t get connected. We ran various Adware detection and removal utilities and couldn’t find anything that would cause the AOL connectivity problems. The support representative we spoke with even admitted that he couldn’t understand why the customer would have been asked to run it. Our conclusion, in light of this sequence of events, is that this was a pacifier to get the very irrate customer off the AOL freecall support line.

Hopefully, all the AOL configuration and settings will now be correctly set-up to allow the customer to connect with the full power of AOL Gold.

RSL will most definitely not being going with AOL for the provision of our broadband service in a few weeks.