O2 Tech Support baffled by a null user activation

[Anonymous]

I don't know if it's worth posting this here but I have a problem that has
remained unresolved by the O2 Customer Services and Technical team for more than a month and a half now.

I'm sorry if the explanation ends up being rather long, but this is a really serious issue and concerns the technical competence of the O2 mail and broadband service.

I began an O2 Broadband Home service in the middle of June 2010 and it all works perfectly Router/Modem/Connection/Speed/ but one thing that went wrong was my account wouldn't "activate" with the User Name and Password they set me up with on the phone when first registering the Broadband Deal. Luckily I didn't need this to connect my home Router to the service as that worked on my home phone number and didn't require an email broadband login.

After as many as 6 attempts to get the Tech Support team to find out why I can't log-in to my account and why it remains "inactive" they have promised to get back to me once they've solved the problem of why the User Name and Password and the associated email address won't work.

To tide me over they kindly gave me a spare email address which I then had to tell a couple of hundred people that my O2 new address was not going to be the original one but would be the new one. I was glad of this, but it took a fair bit of phoning and discussing before I got them to take this rather drastic stop-gap measure.
That new stop-gap email works well and I can send and receive email on this substitute address but of course this new email does nothing to address the problem of not being able to log-in to view my Broadband Home account on the O2 Website.
I still have no way of accessing it.

Admittedly I don't start paying on the Direct Debit for a month or more as I got 3 months free of charge on this deal. But I suspect it will never be possible to log in to it, because the fault that is happening has never been seen before according to Tech Support. Trust me, to catch a rare internet disease!

How difficult can it be to "reset" a new email address for login to account purposes only and leave the existing spare one running for good?

The Tech Support have made several attempts to take my issue up with the mail room people but each time they've tried, the mailroom has been closed.
I thought email and newsroom servers were open 24/7 but maybe this is something that is the pay-off from having O2 run by too many branches sited in continental lands and not having a home-base from where our details and business is run.

I can't see this issue ever being resolved and I imagine that I won't ever be able to access my account online. So I'm destined to just run the home broadband service until I'm fed up with it and move on to something else.

I'm beginning to wonder whether all the advice I'd been given about going for cable over adsl broadband might have been worth taking.

Can anyone here tell me why an account would fail the login and be impossible to fix? Or maybe why someone hasn't the knowledge to just start again and issue a new O2 email login associated with the account that is already up and running?
Is this a case of technical people being strangled by the over obsession with security I wonder?
Thanks
--
Plado

[perksie]

You might have been better to have posted this in the Laptops and Broadband forum, as there are O2 staff there who may be able to sort this out for you.

[Anonymous]

Thank you very much. I'll try that.
Amazing that by coincidence (I think) my o2 mail has gone down since around mid afternoon and refuses to send or receive yet I can pass email through the server using my mobile broadband email address without any trouble.

Things are starting to go a bit pear-shaped and I was wondering how long before they did since starting this account.

Thanks for your help.
--
Plado

[perksie]

As far as I know email's working fine.

I would double check your settings.

[Anonymous]

Well that's not what the Tech Support told me. They said email sending and receiving had gone down and it may not be fixed for some hours.
So why are they telling me nonsense?

My passwords and settings have remained unaltered. And to add to that I've even tried connecting on my macbook laptop which has a completely different mail client and nothing has altered the settings on that either.

Do you think someone in tech support has messed up my settings and now neither of the O2 addresses for my broadband will work?

I'm getting really cheesed off with them.

[perksie]

You would get a better chance in the Broadband forum of finding out what's happened from one of the O2 staff who could check your accounts for you if they're still around.

They won't see your posts here.

[Anonymous]

I've just tried that by sending a PM to Paul@o2 and hope he can resolve it but it doesn't really look very good when the phone customer services tech support just give me a pile of guff about the server being out which is then contradicted by people on this forum who say it isn't

I don't think that looks very good in the realms of service to customers does it?
We should be able to speak to a tech person who can solve it on the phone.

In the early days of internet service providers you could phone a tech guy and get them to ping your mail down to you if it got stuck. How far have we come since then? Backwards I'd say.