Ubc`s Standard Of Service

[midas]

It is now Sunday morning at 8.32 am and once again ALL news channels are off the air on UBC- as they were just 2 or 3 weeks ago and before that ! These guys seem to have more problems with their signals being " off the air " - far more than any other cable company I have ever experienced. Does anyone else think the same ?

[ovenman]

My UBC just glitched out for about ten minutes or so. I thought it was perhaps just me but apparently not. Everything seems to be okay now but it looks as though they may have reorganized their channel line-up. Anybody else experiencing this?

[midas]

But Ovenman - this seems to happen a lot with UBC !

[ovenman]

But Ovenman - this seems to happen a lot with UBC !

I've been a UBC subscriber for five plus years and can't honestly say that I have had problems like this all that often. However, I am not a big television watcher so perhaps I am not the best judge...

[bdenner]

Don't watch much TV either - BUT

I can't stand the lousy music they play through the RED (you can't watch farang advertising) screens.

The quality of CNNs picture has fallen lately.

They constantly reset my personal settings to default.

Too many repeats.

What's the alternatives? I have PSI as well just for ABC Asia Pacific.

[lopburi3]

I have had UBC since it began as UTV and they have been much better providing service than the jokers in Florida I had previously. Much less downtime.

As for quality and cost will not argue that point - but for the fixed line cable service it has been very reliable.

[The Coder]

Don't watch much TV either - BUT

I can't stand the lousy music they play through the RED (you can't watch farang advertising) screens.

The quality of CNNs picture has fallen lately.

They constantly reset my personal settings to default.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Ditto. The things that annoy me about UBC:

1. They superimpose their dumb logo on all channels, all of the time. Great, now I typically have two or even three dumb logo's covering what I want to watch. Where will this end?

2. The tiny amount of programming information the box displays means you must go to their web site or use the magazine to find show times of anything happening more than an hour later.

3. When they put up the red banners during commercial breaks, they need to learn the concept of BACKGROUND MUSIC. Viewers are going to be listening to it over and over many times just during one show so blaring the same crap 1000 times really loud gets old very fast.

4. When it rains, the signal can go kaput and all channels go black. This is especially annoying during live sporting events and was never a more glaring deficiency than during the world cup 2002 when every outdoor big screen in Bangkok went black during critical matches. This is one of those things where they just failed to factor in their unique environment (rainy season rains once or twice a day) into building an appropriate service for it. Reminds me of the Philippines choosing cheap search and rescue helicoptors that don’t work in their monsoon weather when they need them the most.

5. Shabby picture quality. Football fields turn to green mushy swamps when the camera pans, channels like cnn lately sometimes heavily pixelate to unreadability, and just in general the poor quality picture across the board makes me want to squint and distracts me from what i am viewing--shimmering, blotchy areas, and things moving out of step. Lossy compression is the worst ever invention as it was just a matter of time before someone like UBC came along and abused it so badly.

6. Changing channels is slow and sometimes fails to catch the signal and you either have to wait 20 seconds or try again.

7. Outages. There have been some big ones, including losing the Thai channels for over a month solid. They didn’t do anything besides deflect blame to Shin satellite and try to act like it was not big deal by saying it only affected “some” of their customers when in fact every single DSTV subscriber lost them. When a company signs up to cheap, unreliable providers upstream, they need to pair it with a backup system that works. Having a cheap, unreliable chain and no backup is a recipe for the disasters like this that inevitably happen.

8. The cost just doesn't fit the quality of the service. If the service is 160 baht a month the prior things wouldn't bother me so much, but at 1600 a month it does. Kind of like if you have a dash rattle in a BMW is unacceptable, but in a Ford you live with it. If they charge a lot, they should offer a lot but they just don't hold a candle to a real digital service like say DirecTV in the USA. It is irksome they portray themselves as offering a quality product and have primed us for yet another price hike. They had said a year ago they almost made profitability, but not due to their efforts but rather due to the weakening dollar which this year has reversed direction so they are undoubtedly going to ask us to pay up again.

But there is one thing I like about UBC which I thought this thread was going to be about. The customer service has been very good. Anytime I have called them, they very rapidly took good care of my issue.

[OldAsiaHand]

UBC's standard of service has always been so poor that it would be impossible EVER to conclude that it's 'slipping.' Where is God's name could it 'slip' to?

[Butterfly]

UBC's standard of service has always been so poor that it would be impossible EVER to conclude that it's 'slipping.' Where is God's name could it 'slip' to?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

[The Coder]

My UBC just glitched out for about ten minutes or so.  I thought it was perhaps just me but apparently not.  Everything seems to be okay now but it looks as though they may have reorganized their channel line-up.  Anybody else experiencing this?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Ahhhhh I figured out how to fix this!!! The "new" channel order as of Sunday morning was the most scrambled, illogical order and I couldn't stand it. It was as if someone shuffled them all into completely random order. I tried unplugging the receiver for a while, but that did not do anything. What did work is go to the remote: menu -> setup -> channels -> "recall" to reset. This put the order back to the way it was before Sunday and now I can find things again and it matches the programming guide. Hope this helps.

[Firefoxx]

Annoying things about UBC:

1. The female English announcer's voice... the super-cheery voice with great accent but INCREDIBLY LOUSY choice of emphasis on words.

2. Sporadic total signal loss, at least once a month (cable). Can last from a few minutes to a day.

3. The anti-commercial screens wouldn't bother me too much IF they didn't suddenly turn it on IN THE MIDDLE OF THE EFFIN PROGRAM.

4. Picture quality varies from channel to channel... the free channels being the best, the cable channels being the worst. Great.

5. Doesn't affect me much... but... their English to Thai translators SUCK BADLY. Even a native Thai would find the translations whacked.

Considering that they constantly *raise* their subscription prices, it's a wonder that their quality keeps dropping. The rule of diminishing returns, perhaps?

Their call center is OK, not great, but at least better than other call centers, like True. Once I called True about why I couldn't log in. I already guessed it was a problem at my CO, since I had the problem before, and told the lady as such. After going through all the boring diagnostics (half an hour) the lady FINALLY has the head to go check whether there was a problem in the area, which there was. I can understand "procedure", but if you waste the customer's time as well as your own on it, then it's not doing its job.

[sajal]

Ditto. The things that annoy me about UBC:

1. They superimpose their dumb logo on all channels, all of the time. Great, now I typically have two or even three dumb logo's covering what I want to watch. Where will this end?

2. The tiny amount of programming information the box displays means you must go to their web site or use the magazine to find show times of anything happening more than an hour later.

3. When they put up the red banners during commercial breaks, they need to learn the concept of BACKGROUND MUSIC. Viewers are going to be listening to it over and over many times just during one show so blaring the same crap 1000 times really loud gets old very fast.

4. When it rains, the signal can go kaput and all channels go black. This is especially annoying during live sporting events and was never a more glaring deficiency than during the world cup 2002 when every outdoor big screen in Bangkok went black during critical matches. This is one of those things where they just failed to factor in their unique environment (rainy season rains once or twice a day) into building an appropriate service for it. Reminds me of the Philippines choosing cheap search and rescue helicoptors that don’t work in their monsoon weather when they need them the most.

5. Shabby picture quality. Football fields turn to green mushy swamps when the camera pans, channels like cnn lately sometimes heavily pixelate to unreadability, and just in general the poor quality picture across the board makes me want to squint and distracts me from what i am viewing--shimmering, blotchy areas, and things moving out of step. Lossy compression is the worst ever invention as it was just a matter of time before someone like UBC came along and abused it so badly.

6. Changing channels is slow and sometimes fails to catch the signal and you either have to wait 20 seconds or try again.

7. Outages. There have been some big ones, including losing the Thai channels for over a month solid. They didn’t do anything besides deflect blame to Shin satellite and try to act like it was not big deal by saying it only affected “some” of their customers when in fact every single DSTV subscriber lost them. When a company signs up to cheap, unreliable providers upstream, they need to pair it with a backup system that works. Having a cheap, unreliable chain and no backup is a recipe for the disasters like this that inevitably happen.

8. The cost just doesn't fit the quality of the service. If the service is 160 baht a month the prior things wouldn't bother me so much, but at 1600 a month it does. Kind of like if you have a dash rattle in a BMW is unacceptable, but in a Ford you live with it. If they charge a lot, they should offer a lot but they just don't hold a candle to a real digital service like say DirecTV in the USA. It is irksome they portray themselves as offering a quality product and have primed us for yet another price hike. They had said a year ago they almost made profitability, but not due to their efforts but rather due to the weakening dollar which this year has reversed direction so they are undoubtedly going to ask us to pay up again.

But there is one thing I like about UBC which I thought this thread was going to be about. The customer service has been very good. Anytime I have called them, they very rapidly took good care of my issue.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

9. The fact that they(or any other service here) dont give a $hit about good customer feedback like the one above....

due to all these reasons ive stopped my subscription to UBC....

now i high speed adsl n download all the movies n tv episodes i want....

much newer programes.....and much more choice too....

news channels the apartment already offer....