We all have a phone company horror story. Broken promises, uncaring and unhelpful customer service reps and baffling charges are the a recurring theme of these long-running dramas.

My best phone company story didn’t even happen to me. It struck down a close friend, but I was there to witness it all unfold over a few hot days in July a few years back. It involved, yep, Telecom Italia.

Michael, my neighbour in the hills of Amandola, a quiet rural community in central Italy, needed a phone line in his newly restored country house. It seemed like no big deal, as our neighbours just up the road and just down the road were already connected, but Telecom Italia reps assured him this was not true. They checked whatever records it is they have and informed him not only that our neighbours weren’t hooked up, but that our neighbours didn’t exist. In the world according to Telecom Italia, our little hilltop community had been wiped off the map by some tidy bookkeeping decision.

Michael persisted and they finally agreed to send somebody over. Next week, they promised. Big mistake. Weeks turned into months and still nobody showed up. Like a man seeking vengeance, Michael rang Telecom Italia daily. Finally, three guys showed up with far more kit than you could ever imagine was necessary to install a simple phone line. Michael was delighted. There were pieces of a massive aluminium pole, bales of cord, shovels, a winch: the full works, packed onto the truck. The trio surveyed the property intently and then got back in the truck and drove away. They were gone.

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  Bernhard Warner

They came back the next morning with a plan of attack. One, the supervisor, we presumed, immediately got on his mobile phone and made serious-sounding calls. The other two branched off in different directions, one armed with a shovel, the other with a Dirty Harry-sized drill. The first man, seeing a massive expanse of untended terrain, went straight for the flower garden and started to dig a massive hole, perhaps because the soil was softest there. While an incredulous Michael pleaded with the digger to excavate elsewhere, the drill man went inside the house to bore indiscriminate holes in the walls. At one point, not bothering to check on where his drill bit might end up, he pierced the base of the shower. Michael was in a panic trying to stop this trio turning his 16th-century stone house into a war zone. Somehow, calm prevailed, and after several hours the men left. Michael was left with a jaw-breaking installation bill and he continues to curse the company’s name every time the voices in his head utter it.

Apparently, people far more influential than Michael have fallen victim to similar treatment. The European Union has thoughtfully commissioned a comprehensive survey to see just how dissatisfied the average European consumer is with his phone company, no doubt influenced by a high-ranking official’s woeful experience trying to get a new phone line installed. The findings are startling.

Nearly a quarter of EU residents have completely abandoned their fixed-line provider, using only mobile phones at home. In the new member states of Eastern Europe, nearly 40 per cent have dumped the landline, and in Western Europe, one household in five has defected. The level of disaffection is highest in Finland (61 per cent) and Portugal (48 per cent), high in Italy (37 per cent) and considerably lower in the UK (15 per cent).

To put it mildly, this doesn’t bode well for fixed-line telcos such as BT and Telecom Italia. As mobile operators invest in mobile broadband services, the shackles that keep us doing business with an uncaring former monopolist will disappear. People are making the jump now out of sheer exasperation, primarily in the fringe areas where a reliable wireless alternative is operating. When mobile broadband is reliable, cheap and widely available, expect the defection rates to soar. Not surprisingly, the EU report finds that quality of service is still customers’ top priority for choosing and remaining with a telecoms company.

But inside the pages lies a cautionary note for mobile operators as well. They too are criticised by consumers, one in four of whom reports not always being able to connect to a mobile network to make a phone call. Another 28 per cent report dropped calls. The report also calls out internet service providers: 22 per cent of respondents said they had experienced difficulties reaching the ISP to report connection problems.

The market snapshot emerging today is one of consumer dissatisfaction with the entire telecoms industry. Customers have no qualms now about trying new technology or providers that promise better service, and right now the promise of better service appears to come from “anybody but the fixed-line telco”. For the phone companies, this could be the scariest horror story yet.

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Bernhard Warner, a freelance journalist and media consultant, writes about technology, the internet and media industries. He can be reached at techscribe@gmail.com

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