China Telecom has guts.......

From March 26 until April 17, my Internet and home telephone provider, CHINA TELECOM, had a massive failure in our neighborhood, which required rewiring and new hardware in many building complexes. So, for about 3 and 1/2 weeks I had no access to Internet from my home, nor a home telephone, nor could watch satellite TV. Yet, they billed me the full amount for that time.

I refused to pay the bill (it is not the money, but the principle behind it {and maybe some attitude too}). The so called "leader" at CHINA TELECOM replied that now I have again phone and Internet service, so must pay the bill according to contract. My reply to him was that contract says I should pay 119 Rmb per month for a home phone connection and Internet connection of 4 Mb. Since I had no service, I did not have to pay".

And CHINA TELECOM, whose slogan is "SERVCE FIRST" (??????), instead of negotiating a mutually satisfactory settlement to the issue, did the unthinkable, disconnected me.

Ja, Ja. Once I realized I was disconnected, went over to another provider and got service back within the same day. Now, CHINA TELECOM is calling my cell phone telling me I can not do what I just did.

I can be a hard headed bastard on a matter of principle. I was really upset to learn that while they charged me for 4 Mb service to connect to Internet, since they were using regular telephone lines, they were giving me only 1 Mb connection so they would not overload the system. And when I complained of very slow service, they just ignored my complains. What a bunch of crooks !. Even when they installed fiber optic cable, the best they ever got was 3.7 Mb on download, and 0.57 on upload.

It does pay to double check everything.