Breathing Again.....

Been off line for a total of 12 hours this week because of a major fault at KPN, the provider that handles my XS4All business account. Believe me, when you're phone, web and bank transfers depend on one centre, it makes you feel very vulnerable. However, like 2 million other VOIP users in the Netherlands, I don't mind trading occasional outages like this for a significantly lower price point. I must save a couple of thousand Euros a year by consolidating traffic in this way.

But it remands a real hassle when you're offline for technical reasons. There seems to be a loop with the helpdesks when this happens. I can't gain access to the Xs4all website to read news updates on the problem - or to read the message that you shouldn't call the XS4ALL helpdesk because they don't know when KPN will fix the problem either. They need to rethink this bit. Perhaps an SMS warning service when the VOIP system goes down? It is going to fail again sometime, so why not warn us when it happens?