Singtel agreed to send out a technician to fix my invalid mio TV service number problem. I was very thankful that they could send someone the following morning and that he turned up early!

In the end the solution to the problem was to reset my profile, which is exactly what they tried to do last night. The technician said that it didn’t seem to have been done properly last night, but once he contacted the back office people to do it this morning it worked. If only they had done it correctly last night I could have watched the end of the F1 qualifying and seen Mark Webber get pole!

The problem was caused by my mio TV set top box somehow being unauthorised, thus the invalid service number problem. I would hope that Singtel is looking into how this could have happened so as to avoid future problems. It certainly wasn’t anything I did!

Anyway, I’m glad mio TV is now working again so I can watch the F1 race live tonight. Also, credit where credit is due, Singtel’s customer service was quite efficient from the initial call response time to the technician arriving early and resolving the problem. If only they had done the profile update correctly last night!

I was cooking dinner and decided turned on mio TV to tuck into my steak and salad while watching the the F1 qualifying. Alas, I came out of the kitchen to a blank screen. I had to look at my projector to make sure it was on! Time to troubleshoot.

My first step was to hit the guide button which did show that everything was indeed on when the guide information appeared on screen. I changed the channel and that worked, so I switched it back to the F1 qualifying only to see it freeze in about 5 seconds. Going back and forth between the channels resulted in the same behaviour. Time to reset the mio TV set top box.

I took the power cords out of the set top box and did the same for the ADSL modem/router for good measure. Upon reinserting the power cords the mio TV set top box rebooted and came up with an error message:

Invalid mio TV service number. Please call 1800 5556000 (Home User) or 1606 (Business).

Invalid mio TV Service Number

I tried a couple of variations such as holding the button down on the set top box for 5 seconds and a different order of starting up the two boxes, but nothing worked.

Needless to say at this point I was not happy. My food was almost ready, so I had the phone in one hand calling Singtel and the tongs flipping the steaks in the other. Then I was told to enter my home telephone number.

Now if you have read my earlier post you would know that I only need mio TV for the service itself, but I had to get a phone number (which I never use) as part of the package. That meant I had to go to my filing cabinet and get the damn phone number from my records and call Singtel again. I was now really pissed off and had to call in reinforcements. My wife was sent to the kitchen to finish dinner!

I got through to Singtel’s support people and guess what he asked me to do?

Him: “Could you please reset the box?”

Me: “I’ve done it 3 times already, do you really think it will make a difference doing it once more?”

Him: “I need you to reset the box so that we can track the order of events.”

Me: “Ok…. same problem.” *palm face*

He then had to contact someone to reset my profile and would call me back in 20 minutes. When he called back (in good time too, well done Singtel), he asked me to reset the mio TV set top box again, but to no avail, the same error appeared.

There was nothing else that could be done over the phone, so I’m now waiting for someone to come to my apartment and fix the problem.