MacBook Pro, Merlin XU870, Parallels and Three customer service (part 2)

I man­aged to get hold of Win­dows laptop and try to upgrade the wire­less card firm­ware again. It was suc­cess­ful this time, but it was a three step process:

1. store the cur­rent setting,
2. upgrade the firm­ware and
3. restore the old settings.

As the first attempt to upgrade, only com­pleted the first two stages, the ori­ginal set­tings where lost. So all future attempts would not be successful.

So time to con­tact 3’s data and modem sup­port. In the past I always men­tion upfront I am using an Apple and I get pro­moted to second tier sup­port, talk to a Mac spe­cial­ist and a quick solu­tion. This time because I was also using a win­dows machine, I spent more than ten minutes going through the basics with the first tier of sup­port to make sure I was not doing any­thing stu­pid. How­ever with no easy solu­tion at hand, I was pro­moted to the second tier.

My second tier sup­port per­son was Bushra (sp?), I explained the situ­ation in half a dozen short state­ments. The response was “Your modem is broken. The good news is that it is under war­ranty and we will replace it. I can post it to you or you can pick it up from any 3 store”. I arranged to pick up a new modem from the closest 3 store in Mur­ray Street Mall. I was on my way to the store five minutes later, when I got a call from Bushra, to tell me that there was no wire­less cards in the Mur­ray Street store, how­ever if I wanted to, there was one wait­ing for me at the Hay Street Mall store. I said thank you and walked the extra 50m to pick up my wire­less card.

The bad news was it took twenty minutes for the store to sort out the paper work, so I spent the time surf­ing the web on my phone and listen­ing to what was going on in the store. One thing I did learn is that the staff in the store have very little power. If you have a prob­lem with 3 you need to con­tact their call centre, speak to the second tier of sup­port and you are likely to get it resolved in your favor.

The new card worked straight away.

Things I learnt today

1. Do not use Par­al­lels to upgrade your firm­ware on a Nova­tel Mer­lin XU870 wire­less modem, get hold of a Win­dows laptop instead.
2. If you need to con­tact 3’s data and modem sup­port, tell them you are using Mac and get real support.

tagged apple wire­less modem XU870 three

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 11th, 2007 at 10:42 pm and is filed under Just geek . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.