Greece and the Internet Providers: Another Third Country

You all know by now that i am a Greek, that we still face the covid crisis and ofc that i am too cool to be true. Those are facts that can't be changed. You may also be wondering why i wrote in my title the word "another".

Are there other ones? and if yes which countries fit under that umbrella?

Well ofc except for the actual third countries, i was inspired to write this post after reading the one from @khazrakh who's basically writing about an issue he had with his internet provider and the hardship he faced till somehow solved. Click the link below, it's really an amazing post that i can relate and i believe so can you.

What It Feels Like Living In A Third World Country - Germany And The Internet

My Problems

Problem N1

In Greece, we have a couple of telecommunication provides but the biggest ones that rule the game are 3 and fun fact, one of which has been bought by a German one!

Long story sort the first problem i had was started out around half a year ago when we wanted to increase our speed from 24 to 50 mbps. Note that we are for of us living under the same roof and we all have a laptop / Pc and most of the times at least 3 out of 4 laptops are open for work/studies etc etc.

Thus we had to increase our internet speed. The person that supposes to know more about tech is me, so i had to do whatever needed to be done. Note that i am a person that doesn't want to talk to the phone with others for things like that as i think i will get annoyed and most of the time i am correct.

When the connection was successfully upgraded our internet was cut down. I woke up and they told me that this is the case for around 4-5 hours. I asked wtf, why you didn't call them but they said they didn't know.

So i called the provider and told me they needed to do something like a reboot and that i could do it from my Pc. I told the guy to tell me what exactly to do and if he could wait a little bit because the phone and my Pc is on a different location so either i have to move while we talk or he can wait a couple of minutes till i open the laptop.

The guy was a gem in customer support and told me that he could call me on my cell-phone, he was also very informative and the process was over in less than 2 minutes. He also told me that this will be needed once again when the new router arrives.

So that time came, i called again the customer support, waited around 45 minutes and then an agent talked to me. He asked me different things from the other employee, because of his lack of knowledge. Then i told him the same like i told the other about my laptop etc etc and he replied that "no i can't call you on your cell-phone".

I told him that the guy i spoke last time did so and then he chuckled and told me "ahh ok we can do that". Also, we were 30 minutes on the line and still couldn't do it because he clearly had no clue of what he was doing. I told him that i can't continue because i have to work which was lies, hang up the phone and did the process myself in 2 minutes. Imagine my frustration.

Problem N2

Now, this is a more serious problem that still hasn't been solved. Our router in the span of a day may restart 3-4 times maybe more, maybe less. The whole restarting process may take 5 minutes or so.

There were times that this happened over 10-15 times during the day. You can imagine how bad is this for work or if you are on any sort of an important call. You are actually losing money, you get frustrated and it isn't your fault.

One day my sister was writing her exams in the university and they had a rule of 2 disconnections (they suck as well). She got disconnected 2 times because of the router and was on the verge to get 0 and fail the exam. So she got a 0 at the end of the because the providers suck big time.

As you can imagine the frustration levels were at red, we call them waited 1 hour and then an agent told us the basics like, restart the router etc etc. He was talking with my father, i took the phone and told him to just bring the tech team here to see what's the problem is. He also informed us that if the fault is ours we pay from our pocket the tech team or else they pay themselves.

The tech guy came, told us that it's not our problem and that it is theirs. In 2 days it will most likely be fixed. A week passed and nothing, then another one came and the same thing happened.

I was furious, called again the specific tech guy because i had his phone (i asked the last time for it because i had a feeling) and told me that's we have sent the request to the guys that the internet lines belong to and according to their data, they would be here tomorrow to check the box outside.

They came, never informed us but i saw them, went there and they told me it's my problem, not theirs. I called immediately the tech guy and the funny thing was that those 2 were fighting about whose problem it is. Then the tech guy that i was talking to said something socking.

we all know that you are doing this on purpose in order for the people to change provider and come to you

At this point i was so furious i wanted to kick the other guy's ass because i know that "my" tech guy was right. Now it was my turn to shine. I used to work for the n1 telecommunication provider in Greece and not only that i was in HR and was hiring people from every role. That means i was talking with high-level people in the company.

I told the other guy, is your supervisor that one? and after that, is your chief of all the department that one? (thankfully i remembered the names and they haven't changed). The guy looks me in a sock. I took advantage of this and told him, that i knew these guys pretty good i was in HR and look i have their cell phones in mine so just fix my fucking issue and not pretend like there isn't one, i worked in the same company...

He replied with a "ahh i didn't know, sorry, i will fix it right away" and that's how my problem was solved...

Third Country Similarity and Money Talk

So with these issues, they cost us over 1000$ maybe more, and a lot more in terms of time, like the time my sister spent on reading for that exam. While at the same time they make so much money during the quarantine. Everyone upgrades their internet speed to 50 or 100mbps and buy new phones/laptops to meet their needs. Still, they are greedy.

Just imagine how much money could a person working on customer support could lose if working from my home. He may even be fired if in a day he gets disconnected 3-4+ times. The same can apply when you are talking with important people and trying to close a business deal. Their time is limited and with all of these disconnections they may get frustrated and the deal can be simply be off.

Now let's talk a bit about being a Third-world Country. The number one reason that makes us a third world country, in my opinion, is that "we need to know a guy" to work things out. The telecommunications providers are fighting between them and instead of healthy competition, they try to screw us in order to switch to them.

Also, as you saw, you need to know a guy in order to solve your problems otherwise you are screwed and you can be losing money even your job just because they wanna make more money.

I wonder who will read the whole post :P