Storm At Home - Not So Good After All

So I've been using Storm@Home for two months or so now, and I was fairly happy with them. I had fewer problems than I'd been having with Telkom - no login problems - and their e-mail customer support was pertty good - they'd generally get back to me within a couple of hours of e-mailing them.

This changed. A couple of weeks ago I started getting disconnects after being connected for only about 5 minutes or so. It'd start with DNS errors, then I'd get the message box "Link to Storm failed. Reconnect Pending ...", and I'd have to dial in again. It'd always reconnect first time, only to disconnect again a few minutes later. Naturally, this is annoying and expensive, since Telkom charges a minimum call fee.

So I e-mailed them to ask if they'd been having problems, and they said no, but it would be best to phone tech support next time it happened so they could see if they were having problems at that exact time.

Worst suggestion ever. Last Friday I tried that, and I sent them this e-mail on Monday:

I tried calling tech support Friday evening (about 19:20), since again I was being disconnected a couple of minutes after connecting. It was a thorougly unpleasant experience.

The first time I called, I got a recorded message saying that all the operators were busy, but my call would be answered. After about two minutes, I got an engaged tone.
The second time I called, I was cut off after about a minute.
The third time I phoned, the call was answered - I said that I had just called twice and been cut off both times, and was told that I couldn't have been cut off! I said that, yes, I was, and was again told that I wasn't! Eventually, we managed to get past that and I was asked what the problem was. I explained that I had e-mailed a couple of days ago because I was being disconnected shortly after connecting to storm, and that I had been told next time it happened to phone in, which I was now doing since it was happening again.
After telling the whole story, I was asked when I had phoned before. I said that I had e-mailed, not phoned, but it had been Wednesday. I was then told that you had only started answering calls today (which made no sense to me!) and was asked what the problem was! So I described the problem again ... and was then asked it it was a problem with my website! I explained the problem again, and was told that she would get Craig to phone me back. Luckily, as she was saying goodbye I managed to tell her that she needed my phone number, which she had apparently forgotten to ask for!

I understand that your phone calls are recorded "for quality control" - I suggest you go through the logs and do some quality checking, because I am not at all impressed with your customer support via phone; which is odd, because your e-mail customer support has always been excellent.

Craig did, at least, phone me back, and he was quite helpful although he couldn't actually help much - he asked me to try and dial up again, and this time I stayed connected for 10 minutes (at which point I disconnected, since that was longer than I've stayed connected recently).

On Saturday, however, I was disconnected after being connected for about 10 or 15 minutes (I'm not sure of the exact time). I understand that intermittent problems like this are difficult for you to trouble-shoot, but it really becoming inconvenient, as well as expensive!

Do you not maybe have logs which you can examine for this type of thing?


I got the automated reply saying someone would get back to me within 2 hours (which they normally do), but by Thursday I had had no reply. So I e-mailed them again, and still have had no reply. I sent another e-mail off today, as a new issue rather than reply to the old messages, but I don't know if I'll get a reply to that one either.

I suspect that if their system is busy, it drops connections, because this morning I stayed connected for over 45 minutes without a problem. This afternoon, though, I was disconnected after 10 minutes or so. And because it's sporadic and the length of time before the disconnect varies so much, it's obviously difficult to test, but I suspect that it isn't happening on my win98 PC, only on my winXP laptop. So while I don't think it's likely, it's not impossible that it's my modem settings, or something like that. But I don't really care where the problem lies, as long as I can get it sorted out, which they aren't helping me do.

I still have 3 months "free trial" with them, so I'm going to stick with them for now - the cost of redialling is (currently) less than the monthly charge of another ISP. But when the free months are finished, so are they - I understand that there can be technical problems, and I know that this may be a difficult one to sort out. But there is no excuse for treating customers badly and flat out ignoring them, and I will not pay any company that treats me that way.

Update: I actually got a reply from Storm tech support today, apologising for no-one replying to me and assuring me that it would be looked into. They suggest that it may be a modem issue, and recommend uninstalling and reinstalling the modem drivers. I don't know if that's likely to be the solution, since sometimes I do stay connected for a long time, but it's certainly worth a try!

Update 2: After reinstalling the drivers, and installing the latest driver from msupdate (which wasn't easy, since I kept being disconnected while trying to download), I still sit with the same problem. I spoke to tech support again, who have reached the last resort of suggesting that my phone cable isn't properly plugged in, or that the there is noise on the Telkom line. The cable is definitely plugged in securely. Noise on the line is not impossible, I guess, but seems unlikely. Trying to get anything more useful out of tech support also seems unlikely.