Giacom: No network, go direct.

Through many name changes, buy outs, acquisitions, splits and mergers, Giacom took the decision to sell of their network to Wavenet.

This made Giacom a glorified reseller of another provider. They don’t control any part of that service delivery any longer outside of provisioning (which they’re awful at) and assurance (which no more than three of their team are decent at).

You could be believed to think this was a good thing. Giacom, Digital Wholesale Solutions and Daisy before it had constant issues of not managing the network correctly. Repeatedly suffering congestion and downtime.

Memorable events include a whole day because the network just failed. Leaving many thousands offline. Or when they entered in to a deal with SSE to run their broadband brand but failed to ensure they had sufficient BT Wholesale capacity leading to 9 months of congestion issues and instead of stopping orders, they just continued to load them on to the network.

Nine months of daily complaints about the issue but when the question of compensation arose, they denied all knowledge and said they didn’t have any evidence of it. This is despite daily ticket updates with graphs showing the problem. Rather remarkable.

But surely things cannot be the same now, years later. To the same degree, they are not but congestion events happen every month. Partners raise the issue to Giacom, which then takes them several hours to raise to Wavenet, which then takes them several hours to pickup and the reason is nearly always the same.

Giacom don’t seem to understand this is not acceptable in working hours when people are trying to use their services to do business, or make calls. There is never any urgency, or compensation and often it takes a lot of chasing to get a RFO.

But you’re lucky if that happens in office hours. If it happens at night or the weekend, you are out of luck. The out of hours team won’t escalate anything. You could have hundreds of customers down and simply, they’ll make you wait until the next morning, or several mornings if you’re unlucky and it being a Friday!

They don’t own the product, they have no involvement outside of being a downstream customer of another provider.

As a good example of this structure in their business, it has taken them over 3 weeks to get an IP assigned as only one person in their whole business could do so and was on holiday.

If you are looking at Giacom for broadband, there are many better alternatives like Zen, APFN, IP River, PXC and the newly reformed Enta.