C&W and THUS -
Similarly to all others we received notification on the 12th Sept a Saturday of termination on the 31st September. The issue here is not the VoIP service, can can procure and setup SIP/IAX trunking for many vendors and it’s quick and simple. The impact is with the inbound Non Geographics Numbers (NGN).
It seems the only person that Pipecall has a porting agreement with is BT, in discussion with BT they advised that the porting may well take up to 20 days, they also have an amassing charging structure of £10 per number per month and something like 3.5p per minute for all inbound 0845 numbers. Clearly a finacial burden that the majority of SME will not except especially if they have multiple 0845 numbers.
The situation gets even more perverse,
The range owner for our numbers is THUS not Pipecall, having discussed this with the THUS porting team it appears they are unable to port the numbers to THUS from Pipecall, even though they own them and are the range holder.
I have tried to call the so called Product Director a Dan Cole, who’s name the letter came in and he is being screened by his PA and voicemail, he has not returned my calls. I have raised a complaint through the Pipecall help desk, this was defined as their customer complaint escalation process again I have not received a response. It is typical of a C&W managed organisation that their management is of such poor calibre that they are not prepared to defend their decisions and hide behind their secretaries skirts and front office staff. I can say that with some experience having worked there for 10 years.
C&W has a long and sordid history of poorly implemented acquisitions and failed integrations, these have almost without exception led to loss of shareholder value and enormous customer dissatisfaction.
It is imperative that C&W/THUS take a more customer centric approach to the ceasing of the Pipecall NGN services, if there are others who would like to join us in urgently putting pressure on C&W/THUS to re-structure the closure of the Pipecall platform please contact me, I have posted contact details below.
All we are asking for is that the numbers can be ported to the THUS NGN platform prior to the Pipecall platform being decommissioned, this does not sound unreasonable.
Justin Millner – DSM Systems
info@dsmsystems.co.uk
Biting the hand that feeds IT
