Mobistar

I've been using Mobistar for my mobile phone (including mobile internet) and home broadband - both essential for my business - since I got here, and it is the least reliable telephone company I have ever had the misfortune to be involved with. (Incidentally Mobistar is part of Orange, or the France Telecom Group and I have to admit that Orange UK are slightly better: this is to neutralise the fact that the pedants among you will probably point out that they are one and the same thing and therefore it can't be the worst company I've ever used, etc.)

For starters, the internet connection quality is rubbish. The speed of streaming at home is appalling: you can't listen video speeches in any language and YouTube is a write-off.

On the mobile, I can only connect to the web via 'Orange World', which is constantly on the blink, meaning my mobile internet service is unreliable to say the least.

And finally you simply can't get through to Customer Service. I've actually got up during a Mobistar call, walked to the Mobistar shop on Rue de Tongres, and still been on hold on arrival (although that's only about ten minutes).

Bizarrely, every so often someone from Mobistar will call me, for some unfathomable reason, with some totally irrelevant question about how I am enjoying my subscription. I tell them it's pants, and they inform me that a customer service representative will call me back in a few days.

They never do.

Mobistar, your service is crap. Call me.

Polish word of the day: 0012009

I've decided to resurrect 'Polish Word of the Day' - ostensibly to get some culture into an otherwise flagging blog and give Anna a run for her money but basically because it's still by far and away the biggest search hit* and I Want Stats.

Today's Polish Word of the Day is 'pakiet internetowy'. Or even 'pakiet transmiji danych'. (I know that's actually several words. But one single concept).

This is a magic bean that you can bolt on to your sim card or phone contract (if you were the kind of person who stayed in one place long enough to have a phone contract), which allows you to have internet wherever you go. Hurrah, and finally, freedom from sitting in front of the screen! Not only can one check/receive emails on the move (thus avoiding that annoying situation where you have No Work for 48 hours, yet the minute you go outside for a walk/shopping/just to remember what daylight looks like, four million requests arrive, all of which are answered by ... 'never mind, I found another translator' by the time you come back).
Also it would allow me to update my facebook status and get a little mobile phone sign next to it, just to confuse all my friends who work in the city...

Having decided that mobile internet was going to be essential to my professional survival over the next five months, I set out for Carphone Warehouse.

- Sure, said the first guy. You can buy a Blackberry handset (costs a fortune but it'll be worth it), add a SIM-only contract and then cancel it and slip in your Polish SIM once you get over there. No problems!

I spent an evening calculating how many pages of EU regulatory notifications I would have to translate before earning back the £250+ a Blackberry handset would cost me, and whether it would in fact be better to spend this money on minor essentials such as my first month's rent and deposit (I probably lose almost this amount per month in missed jobs when I'm away from my email for whatever reason).
I then passed many happy hours trying to decipher the various websites of Simplus, Era and Blackberry Polska. All excellent vocabulary practice.

The next day I went to the Sevenoaks Mobile Phone Centre. A very smug salesman was very busy with a middle-aged customer. I checked the queue at Phones 4 U and came back about twenty minutes later.

Blackberry? No, you can't do that. It's got to be configured you see - all of ours are locked to Vodafone. If you put a new sim in the email won't work.
You could try the new Nokia...

great!

... but it'll cost you 300quid.

Oh.

Back to the drawing board.

I tried Carphone Warehouse again and talked to a different salesperson.

- You know what? she said; I think maybe for your purposes an email phone isn't the best way forward. Why not get a netbook (greedily I took in the row of tiny 7" Asus laptops, all heavily discounted - hurrah for credit-crunch Britain) and use a PAYG dongle for mobile internet? Then all you have to do is put in your Polish sim when you go abroad!

Wow! A new toy! And wouldn't it look bad-ass in the booth?! (not that I'm in the booth all that often, but who knows, maybe a magic netbook would give me special professional powers)

I wanted one.

I went home and rang the 3G sales line to ask about their mobile broadband roaming rates.

- Um... I'm not actually going to buy anything today but I'd like to... can I still ask you some questions?
I could feel the guy's heart sink at the lost commission, but he gamely agreed to chat to me.

- No... no it doesn't work like that. All our dongles are locked to 3G. You'd have to have it re-configured for a Polish sim. You're basically in a Catch-22 situation** really: if you get an English contract you have to pay massive roaming fees, and if you get a Polish one... well, you're stuck with it for eighteen months.

Oh crap.

Back to the drawing board. Worse still, no new toy for me.

I decided to leave it until I actually got to Poland and then go and talk to the nice guy in the Plus GSM store. And then possibly to the dodgy guy down the road just off Starowiślna, under the sign saying 'Odblokowanie komórki'.

Anyone got a better idea?


*with the exception of anything about Polish men. You'd be surprised. Actually, maybe I should tag all my posts with 'Polish men' and gain a whole new reader demographic.
**I've heard that the French equivalent to this phrase is 'une situation Corneillienne': can anyone give me an Italian or Polish version?