Changing our Cablenet Contract

Four-and-a-half years ago, I wrote about how we decided to move our landline phone and Internet provider from the national company CYTA to the somewhat newer Cablenet.  It saved us about ten euros per month, and gave us a faster Internet connection.

I still have the original documentation, which shows that we signed up for the 'cable/talk + surf + view 20M' package, at €44.64 per month.

At the time, all the Cablenet packages had cable TV included, although we weren't in fact interested in that as we don't watch TV. We thought we might - but it hasn't happened. We wanted to keep our landline phone although we didn't use that much either. And when our last physical phone handset gave up working, we simply diverted the number to Richard's mobile phone; the landline was barely used, and we haven't missed it.

A couple of months after we took out the contract - which was 20M download, and 2M upload, though I'm not entirely certain what the two figures refer to - we were upgraded to 30M/3M, at a slightly inflated cost.  Perhaps that was part of the initial contract; I don't remember. Anyway, for a couple of years it worked well, and we were paying €46.90 per month for the package, plus the occasional few cents if someone dialled the landline and it was then transferred to Richard's mobile.

Shortly after that, we were upgraded again to 75M/5M, and then, earlier this year, 100M/6M. Paperwork arrived with the bill, sometimes, and we glanced at it, wondering if we would do better with a different package. Richard thought that perhaps he could transfer his mobile number to Cablenet as part of one of their new packages which included a mobile. But somehow we never got around to it.

The monthly price had gone up to €52.90 per month, which seemed rather on the high side, when compared to costs elsewhere. But a six euro increase - along with much faster speeds - didn't seem too bad in four years.

Then in the summer, we were away for over a month. Our Cablenet bill for August (it's always paid in advance) had arrived just before we flew, but by the time we collected it from the PO Box, I had turned my computer off. I knew I had until the end of the month to pay it, and since I was taking my laptop with me on our travels, I thought I could easily log into our bank before the end of the month, and pay online. So I popped the bill into my laptop case... and forgot about it.

The Internet connection wasn't great for our first couple of weeks away. But then we stayed for a week in a villa in Coronado, which had a reliable connection. I found the bill, and paid it online without any problem, despite it being about six days after the end of July.

Richard flew back to Cyprus towards the end of August, and visited our PO Box where he found our electricity and water bills, but no Cablenet bill. I was able to pay the other utilities, despite them also being rather late, but was surprised that there was no phone/Internet bill. Everything was working, and I didn't think about it until about ten days ago, when we went to check the PO Box again. Still no Cablenet bill. 

So we went to the Cablenet office. A very helpful lady was able to print off our bill - both the one we should have received in August, and the one for September which had not yet arrived. When we asked why we hadn't had the September one, wondering if they had gone paperless and we'd missed something, she said it was because the August bill was paid late, and attracted a re-connection fee of five euros.

No, that didn't make any sense to us, either.

We asked if we could pay then. Yes, she said. Did we want to pay just the September bill (which included the reconnection fee), or the October one too?  I said we might as well pay them both at the same time, and produced my debit card.

Meanwhile, Richard had been looking at the special offer card that was sitting on the desk.

It was all rather confusing, with several different offers, nowhere near as straightforward as it was four and a half years ago.

I asked if we could have an Internet connection that didn't include TV, since we didn't use that, and the lady suggested a couple of options. However, both of them had rather slower upload speeds than we had been using - and for Richard's work, he likes that as fast as possible.

But after some discussion, we realised that we could get a connection that's almost as fast (5M rather than 6M upload) with the package labelled '2play 60M Purple 2', which costs €39.90/month.

This has no TV, but does include, in addition to home Internet, a mobile phone with a monthly allowance of 400 minutes, 200 SMS and 1gig Internet.  There wouldn't be much point having my phone on this package, since I only spend about €15 per year on pay-as-you-go. I write perhaps thirty text messages in a month, but I don't think I use more than about 60 minutes a year of talking.  And even with my new-to-me smartphone, I don't want to use mobile Internet, other than, briefly, on wi-fi when I'm at home.

However, Richard's phone, which was on a CYTA contract, was costing about €20-30 per month. The basic contract was only €2.50 with what's considered low usage, but he paid another €8 or so for 300m mobile internet per month, and typically at least €10 in charges for calls and texts. Until recently he had used it mainly for work, but now he mostly uses online calling for work calls to people abroad, so the call/text charges to his mobile phone were mostly local. I had felt for a while that we should now be paying this rather than his work (which has been doing so).... 

So once the Cablenet lady had established that his current contract doesn't include any minutes or SMS, she agreed that we would do much better with a new contract. It should save about thirty to forty euros per month.

We had to take in a former CYTA bill in order for the process to begin, but since we already had a Cablenet contract, there were no further charges. Richard was given a new sim card for his phone, and told to change it when he received a text message informing him of when the transfer was done.

On Monday morning he was sent an SMS telling him to start using the new sim card at noon on Tuesday...  and shortly after lunch on Tuesday, when he realised his CYTA connection was no longer working, he changed the card, and everything - so far - has worked perfectly.

All of which is a very long-winded post to say: it's well worth checking special offers with phone/internet companies.  Facilities change, and what seems like a great deal at the start of a contract may not be the best one a couple of years later.

Will we remember to check the options in another two years time....??  That remains to be seen.

Terminating a phone contract... eventually!

Many years ago when we first moved to Cyprus, there was only one phone provider, the national organisation, known as CYTA. We needed a landline and (as I said, this was a LONG time ago) a modem with dial-up Internet connection. Since we were foreigners with no owned property, we had to pay a deposit - and presumably a connection fee - and after a few teething errors, it all worked.

Well, most of the time.

Our bills were initially sent to the PO Box of the organisation Richard was attached to. When that box was closed, we thought it would be straightforward to get everything sent to our own PO box - and it was, for the other utility companies, who still used the efficient method of jotting down notes randomly on ancient sheets of blotting paper or post-it notes.

Unfortunately, the phone company had computerised, so it took about three months for them to get it right.

Over the years we upgraded to broadband, and went through various routers. Mostly it worked; occasionally the service would go down, but - shrug - this is Cyprus. We couldn't understand why we received three different bills in the mail every month: one for the phone, one for the Internet, and one for the connected service. We asked several times if they would put them on just one bill, and the helpful people we spoke to assured us it was possible... but apparently not. Eventually the phone and one part of the Internet service were put on the same bill, so at least we were down to two per month.

Nearly eight years ago when we moved house, everything was straightforward and re-connected quickly. We were impressed.

Buying our own house meant that Richard could, at last, have a mobile phone contract in his name without paying a huge deposit. Previously it had been in the name of a friend who was already a home-owner.  He went to register... and, bizarrely, they could not find any details of our landline contract. So they set him up a new account which - for some reason - had his two first names reversed.   So we were back to having three bills in the mail each month, two to Richard James... and one to James Richard...

There was a slight hiatus about six months ago when we received a bill with both Internet services on the same sheet - hurrah! - although the landline phone bill was still separate.

The problem was that they insisted we were in arrears with our Internet payments. On the other hand, our phone was apparently in significant credit. Happily the amounts were the same, but they had no way to transfer from one part of the account to another.... I paid what they said we owed, and it evened out over a couple of months while our phone bill stayed in credit.

All that is mere introduction to the confusion of trying to transfer from CYTA to another phone provider. It's six weeks since I wrote about getting rid of our CYTA router (and the unexpected benefit of my backache vanishing). Returning the router meant that our Internet contract was finished at the end of February.

Backtracking a little more to the middle of February: if we had wanted a new phone number, we could have had that from the start of March too when it was all installed. But we've kept the same number for over sixteen years, and lots of people know it. And it should have been quite straightforward to transfer it to our new provider...

Except that when Cablenet looked into it, they spotted that Richard's passport (used as ID for many things here) did not have the same number as the one he was registered to with CYTA. Hardly surprising, since passports only last ten years. So they told him to go to CYTA and get his passport number updated.

Unfortunately, CYTA said they could not do that, because there was already an account registered to his new passport number.

'Yes,' he said, when he looked at it. 'That's the account for my mobile phone'. This, of course, explained why they could not find him in their system when he registered the mobile: his passport number had changed. He assumed it would be straightforward to merge the two accounts....

No.

The helpful person at the desk understood the problem, but the computer would not allow them to do it. No problem, they said, they would get someone to do it manually.

But, surprise surprise, when the new provider tried to do the procedure to transfer the phone number, CYTA said they couldn't, because it was the wrong passport number.

So Richard went again, and went through the same process, and another very helpful person said the same thing, and even phoned him an hour later to say it was all done. The new provider asked for copies of both the old AND the new passport, so they could put in two transfer requests, one for each, in case CYTA still hadn't done it.

And it still didn't work. It was getting frustrating. But they kept at it, and eventually, on April 15th, our phone service was transferred from CYTA to Cablenet. Yay.

All's well that ends well, even if the path is a little bumpy en route...?

But no, it wasn't that simple.

CYTA bills are paid in arrears, so I knew we'd still have to pay the February bills (phone and Internet) at the end of March, and the March phone bill at the end of April. I duly paid the February bills online on March 24th and filed them away. I thought no more of it until, in our PO Box a couple of days ago, we found this:

Essentially it says, 'You haven't paid your February Internet bill, and we're a bit worried that you might not, since the service is discontinued.' Dated April 10th. Yes, mail is pretty slow here.

So I checked the online banking and printed out the receipt for that exact amount, which I certainly had paid. It occurred to me that perhaps they had made the account transfer BEFORE I paid the bill. In other words, the bill was to Richard James.... and I paid it to that account. But they now thought it was owed by James Richard...

We went into CYTA on Friday, yet again. We talked to another very helpful person, who totally understood the problem, and could indeed see that the payment had been made - but couldn't do anything about it. So she had to go to the accounts department and get them to deal with it. She couldn't give us any kind of receipt, either, but assured us they had taken care of it.

Richard double-checked that our phone account is now fully terminated, and we were told it was. It then occurred to me that there might still be a deposit - I couldn't remember if we'd claimed it back when we bought our house and moved. So the lady on the desk had a look and said yes, there was indeed a deposit of 150 euros. Richard muttered that it was an odd amount, given that we paid in Cyprus pounds all those years ago; but we weren't going to argue, since we hadn't been sure if the deposit was still there at all.

We had to wait another five minutes while forms were filled in, and the accounts department had to be consulted at length again... but finally, when the phone bills for March and April were deducted, we were handed - and signed for - just over 125 euros in cash.

So it seems that there was, after all, a happy ending.

Just so long as we don't get a summons for an unpaid February bill in the name of James Richard...

Changing our phone/internet provider, and a surprising consequence

Back in October of last year, I wrote a post called 'Images of autumn', which was a rather pretentious-sounding title for what was essentially a summary of several unconnected occurrences which I had not got around to writing about.

Amongst them was this picture of my newly-reorganised study, except that I have managed to add a little arrow near the bottom left:

The arrow shows where our wireless router was put, beside the tall bookcase, connected to the cables that can be seen (if you enlarge the photo) running untidily along behind my chair. 

A couple of months ago, Tim was looking at the costs of various phone companies that now operate in Cyprus, and commented that we could save ten euros per month AND have faster speed if we switched from CYTA - the national company - to Cablenet. We would also, for the first time, get access to cable television. Not that we watch any television, but the occasional news broadcast might be nice, and there was no package that did not include this. 

Various people had experienced good things with this company, so we went to enquire, and made the necessary arrangements. Richard and Tim spent a lot of time deciding how the house could better be wired, and said that the router would have to be behind our television. 

The workmen arrived when they said they would, and after doing some noisy drilling and installing, followed by some tweaking by Richard and Tim (this is about as technical as I get) we now have this arrangement:

And this is what we see on the wall behind:

The television, bizarrely, only shows us black-and-white pictures, because (apparently) there's something wrong with it, or perhaps it's too old (all of seven-and-a-half years), but no worries. Cablenet Internet works, and Richard returned the CYTA router at the end of last month. If CYTA ever manage to get their act together, our phone - on the same number - should work on Cablenet too.

Meanwhile, on an entirely unconnected subject - or so I thought - middle age has been creeping up on me. Last October, a few weeks after I re-started my walks with Sheila, I realised that I was getting backache. I put it down to carrying a heavy belt-bag with my purse and camera, so I stopped taking it. This helped slightly, but I still found my back was aching very badly any time I had been shopping, or if I spent more than about half an hour standing in the kitchen. 

I tried heat, I tried stretching, I tried wearing different shoes. Most of the time it was chronic rather than seriously painful, but there were moments when the twinges meant I had to sit down. Buying a shopping trolley from Lakeland made it easier to do the shopping, and we started getting most of our groceries by car on Fridays.  

But still, my back ached almost continually. I became gradually resigned to it, moving more carefully, doing less in the kitchen, carrying nothing I could avoid. 

A couple of weeks ago, I suddenly realised that my back was not aching. I stood in the kitchen doing various things, and was entirely without pain. It seemed so unusual that I commented on it; I assumed it was a temporary reprieve from the back pain, but it continued. I had not realised quite how continual the ache had become  until I was without it. I noticed it as I came downstairs, as I sat on the floor to put my shoes on, as I got up from my beanbag, as I was able, once more, to do things in the kitchen for an hour or more.

This happy state of affairs has continued. There's still a bit of an ache when I wake in the mornings; I suspect we need a new mattress, or at least a mattress topper. But it goes within a few minutes. And that's it for the day! I've had no painful twinges, and moving is, once again, easy. I'm still avoiding any heavy lifting, and I'm using my shopping trolley - no point taking unnecessary risks - but I am very much appreciating having a back which no longer aches almost continually. 

A few days after my backache so mysteriously vanished, we were talking somewhat about electromagnetic sensitivity: a long name for an increasing condition, where people are (or become) sensitive to mobile phones, or wifi devices. I have never liked mobile phones - in the early days they all gave me a tingling sensation in my hands, almost like a mild electric shock - and although modern ones are better, I still have a problem with smartphones, or even my Kindle when the wi-fi is switched on. We used to think I was some kind of over-sensitive freak; in recent years we have met more and more people with the same kind of sensitivity. 

Then, idly browsing on the topic, I came across this article about electromagnetic sensitivity. Symptoms are far wider than a bit of tingling. I browsed some more, and found a surprising number of anecdotes about people who had aches and pains of all kinds, often headaches, which disappeared as soon as a wireless device - or router - was moved further away.  The 'problems' seem to happen when a device was closer than a metre to a sensitive person.

And, yes... this is where the diverse topics of this post converge. When we thought about it, we realised that the day my backache vanished so unexpectedly was the same day that Richard took the old wireless router back to CYTA. The one which had been about 60cm away from my back whenever I sat at my desk. Which is at least two or three hours per day, often more.  Prior to my re-organising of my study (and prior to my backache) the router had been in a small unit about a metre and a half away from me. 

Anecdotal only, of course. Anecdotes, as Tim has reminded me, do not constitute research. Nonetheless, it seemed to be a good idea to add my experience to the pool. If anyone who happens to see this has unexpected aches or other symptoms, and spends much of their day less than a metre from a wireless router (or smartphone/tablet) then it would do no harm at all to try a few days without it - and might, just possibly, make a difference.