Re: They don't even know where their fiber runs
I could see the VM fiber ran most of the way down the street, and also along the road bordering the other side of my new house, yet it stopped short about 70m from the pavement at the front; I was in a dead zone.
This used to be the case with me. However, a few months ago they had a big programme of digging up our pavements & roads and all the houses that were in the null zone now have cable spurs going to just by their house. And my dog now has a nice new VM grey cabinet to pee against when he goes out for a walk[1]..
A couple of weeks later I got a doorstepper who asked me whether I would go over to VM. I explained^W ranted to him for a couple of minutes (we had previously used VM Business at work and had shocking service from them - including billing us for lines we had terminated[2]). Plus, I run some websites and email domains from my server and so buy a commercial line for home (otherwise my SMTP traffic would get blackholed by a lot of ISPs - just like I generally blackhole SMTP traffic from consumer IP ranges..).
After my 5-minute rant his comment was "I'll put you down as a no then"..
[1] I'm assuming that their line cases are vaguely waterproof - putting a big grey box on a pavement is an open invitation to be used as a marking spot by every passing dog (and probably a few cats as well).
[2] Their excuse was "well, you didn't request that we terminate the billing did you?". A pointed letter from our legal department soon sorted things out and they payback more than paid for one FTE - the person that had the job of sorting things out..
Biting the hand that feeds IT
