BT are useless

[Grumpy Northener]

So before moving house we inform BT - give them our new address moving dates etc - given that have had six weeks notice you would think that they would have it all sorted in plenty of time but ho no !!! now after a further 4 weeks of engineers not turning up, extensive excuses such as 'We have to lay a new cable over 300 metres to your property so that you can have our broadband service' - which is quite odd because the previous property owners had a BT broadband service and as sure as hell there has not been any new cable laid to the property - I have lost the will to write down all the excuses / reasons / delays / cock ups that they have made - which includes sending the the new hub to our old address and so it goes on - However, today they finally got off their fat backsides and managed to connect broadband to the property - its only taken 10 weeks to sort - its a hell of letter that will land on the customer service directors desk by the time I have finished it !!

[TerryG]

It took them 3 attempts and eventually 4 engineers to install a new analogue line at my current office then the following day another engineer turned up to do the same job.
One of my Friends ordered BT Phone & Broadband in July last year, it took them 3 months to do the phone, still no broadband, continual excuses and new dates but still nothing.
There is a reason for BT's TERRIBLE reputation for lack of customer service. It's because it's true!

[tractorman]

I would imagine that yor letter will disappear without anything being done if my neighbour's experience is anything to go by!

A couple of years or so ago his broadband started dropping out and the lad swapped some cables around between the main cabinet and the junction box at the bottom of our road and said that cable was about done - only two unused leads and many "condemned" ones. It didn't cure the fault for long (less than a week), so another "engineer" came and tweaked things a bit before saying the cable between the cab and the JB were shot. The fault continued for a few months, with BT saying the line was fine for the phone, so they didn't need to do anything about the 300K speed!

The neighbour is a retired ship's engineer, but was still doing work from home and BP (his ex boss) were paying for his broadband, so they complained to BT and little happened. After a few months of this, he wrote to the MP and eventually got a call from a BT manager who told him that the problem was too complicated for him to understand (the neighbour used to set up the IT links between ships and shore!), so was told exactly what. The "engineer" called to say that they had run out of free cables, so had been told to use the best of the condemned ones! Meanwhile BT said nobody else had problems, so I wrote to the MP and complained (I'm with PlusNet, so BT never deal direct with me - but I had 800K!!), saying that everyone who had phones from that cable had bad broadband, but lots of different ISPs - who all fobbed us off with "reset the modem" and other stories so they could avoid calling BT out to fix the problem (that they reckoned were a user issues). The neighbour had over 25 visits from BT in about four months and kept telling them that it was the main cable. Eventually, they changed the cable (with a lot of moaning) and our speed is now 2Mb or more (we are about three miles from the exchange so can't expect much faster speeds)!

[suffolkpete]

As someone who retired a couple of years ago after 42 years service with BT, the above makes me cringe. Those events are inexcusable. In my opinion, it all started to go wrong a few years ago when someone decided it was a good idea to "offshore" their call centres and a lot of internal technical support. I used to find that my internal contacts, a lot of whom had been doing the job for years and knew it inside out, had taken voluntary redundancy and been replaced by someone who had had a day's training, was working to a script and had an accent I could barely understand. In my private life, I avoid firms with offshore call centres, but there I was being compelled to use them at work.
A few observations though, just because your neighbour has broadband doesn't mean you can, there may be no suitable spare pairs in the local cable. In the seventies, there was a copper shortage, so a lot of aluminium cables were laid. It seemed a good idea at the time when broadband hadn't been thought of and they worked perfectly well for telephony, but they are useless for broadband and are only gradually being replaced. If laying a new cable means digging up a road, then it can take a long time, due to a piece of legislation called the Public Utilities and Street Works Act which set a lot of hurdles for anybody wishing to dig up the highway. Plusnet is wholly owned by BT.
If you are experiencing poor speeds, it can be due to the fact that the internal wiring in your house isn't up to scratch. If your network termination is the sort that is in two halves, you can undo and remove the half containing the socket and you will find a test socket. Plug the router directly into this and see if the speed is significantly better. This is perfectly legal provided you don't disturb the wall box itself. If it is then obtain an ADSL faceplate, connect your internal extensions to the filtered output and plug the router into the ADSL socket on the faceplate. You can then remove the microfilters from the phones. I live three miles from the exchange and my current speed is over 4 Mbit/s, up from half that being carrying out those changes.

[tractorman]

Another problem we have is a large top secret ULF radio station half a mile away (the "Rugby" time signal is transmitted from the site too) and, because it's top secret "NATO" stuff, built by the Americans and was run by BT International, nobody knows anything about it (look for Anthorn on Google Earth or Streetview). This gives the "Openreach" lot a great excuse: it's the radio station (with tons of copper earthing below the masts) that is causing the problem.

When they discover that it doesn't transmit very often (we can hear the mains hum when it does) and is usually silent when they come, they get a bit miffed!

As Pete says, BT used to be a trustworthy outfit and most of the "engineers" that came knew what the problem was and were as annoyed as the neighbour was about "management" (from Newcastle) being full of their own self-importance - and protecting their budgets!

One of the first attempts to repair my system was an "expensive filter" and new master socket with separate ADSL (one of the BT extensions stopped working after that, but I am not going to bother about it!). That helped me a lot - my speed went up from 120k to 1M and didn't cut out every day! One of the less able "engineers" put a separate filter on next door's line - it already had a split master socket - and it filtered out the phone but still didn't make the BB work!! It took two more visits to sort that mistake as he'd also cut through the non-BT extensions that were plugged into the master socket when he rewired the "bad cables"!! The lad who repaired it put a massive filter on - about the size of a 7lb grease tin - that is still in the neighbour's garage as nobody seems to want to take it away! That filter failed too, but was supposed to filter out the RF from the radio station, so we didn't expect anything to change.

Another neighbour had problems after the new cable went in. His neighbour had extended his house, so the phone line had to be moved and a new pole put up on the "corner" of the extended house's garden. After a week or two, the neighbour lost broadband and rang BT and told them what the fault was. An "engineer" came out and checked in the house, when the neighbour told him what the fault was. The "engineer" then told him he was wrong and it was an exchange fault, disappeared and came back later to say the fault was cleared (it wasn't). The neighbour repeated that it was in whatever box he'd told him and the "engineer" still said he was wrong. The neighbour then said he was a retired BT engineer (working on the top secret radio station), the lad went up the ladder to the box, found a loose connection and the fault was cured!

Note the use of inverted commas for engineers - they call themselves that, but I certainly don't think many of them are that well qualified - or trained!

[Martin Evans]

We have had some real problems with BT at the shop and I had one at home, where my line is no longer with them. Admittedly, the problem, that resulted in my leaving BT, was caused by Onetel (Now absorbed into TalkTalk) and I will say here and now (And would stand up in court), that Onetel were a bunch of crooks. Unfortunately for BT, the problem caused by Onetel, was not on their flow chart and they completely mishandled the matter.

I think this sums it up. Too may large concerns employ lemons, who can only follow a flow chart (Fools who obey rules, rather than wise men, who are guided by them) but who are possessed of no initiative. If the flow chart doesn't fit the circumstances, they either go off at cross purposes or grind to a halt. When things are working, they are OK and it is only when things go wrong, that they are found wanting.

A few years after the Onetel/Wallicom debacle, I had a new bank account number. By this time, my phone was with the Post Office (Weren't all phone lines before privatisation). The Post Office has specified direct debit, as the means of payment. Since my old bank had cocked something up on my account (This is what happens when spivs manage banks, not properly qualified A.C.I.B.s) and left me out of pocket, I had recouped my loss, by guaranteeing a cheque for said amount, after I had emptied the account. In the circumstances, it was not a smooth account transfer, so I had to notify the direct debit beneficiaries, of the new account details, myself.

All went well, except that the Wally Office failed to collect the payment. As a result, I got a red letter. I referred them back to my original letter, that they had obviously actioned (Since there was a DDR set up on my new account) and I suggested that they collect the payment, for which they held a mandate. Clearly this kind of cock up was not on their flow chart, as they threatened to cut me off. My next letter, after asking them which bit of my previous letter, they had not understood, pointed out that cutting me of would be a breach on contract (They had insisted on DDR, they had a mandate and I had provided funds to cover it) and that such breach would make the contract void and when a contract is void, the whole thing is void, including payment. They cut me off and after a final warning, I transferred my telephone elsewhere and the Post Office got nothing. They did get a firm of debt collectors involved. I pointed out to them, that no payment is due, under a void contract but this only resulted in a more threatening letter, so my final letter stated “I don’t know whether you are unable to understand my letter of 20 December (To which I cannot add anything) or whether it goes beyond the crowbar mentality, prevalent in many of your kind. In the circumstances, perhaps “Sod off” is simple enough for you?” They had also been addressing their letters wrongly and I pointed out, that any further wrongly addressed letters, would be sent back not known as this address. I did receive a few more incorrectly addressed letters and they were sent back unopened, “Not known at this address”. This suggested that my last letter didn’t fit any of the debt collector’s flow charts but perhaps “Not known at this address” did, after two or three goes!!

[mach1rob]

They don't like it when you start shouting breech of contract at them for failing to supply the service you're paying them for, they got the arse with me after I told them to do one 14 months into an 18 month 'contract' for being unable to provide a BB service that I was paying for, after much tooing and froing they finally got the message when I cancelled the DD and changed providers. I'm afraid talktalk are just as bad as BT, they were adamant that there was no problem on my line despite bb regularly dropping out every few minutes and a crackly phone line, they told me they'd sent engineers out, but we never saw one, certainly no one came to the house to check anything. After switching from TT to BT (no choice as no one else was able to take the line back over from TT, they don't tell you that when you sign up!) an engineer did finally turn up after a line test showed an issue, it was eventually traced to the wire to the house from the pole, as it passed through a tree and branches had worn through the cables.

Been with Sky for an age now, and no real issues, apart from one when we first moved in to new place, the cable to main box ran all around the hall, up and over 4 doors before reaching the master socket, and this cable was shot, so connection was crap. Sky had a BT engineer out next day, but he decided it was too much like hard work to drill 1 hole in the bottom stair, go to the cupboard under the stairs, pull cable through, and use an existing hole in wall to connect cable to socket, he was going to run it the same way as old cable, but said he'd leave us enough cable to run that way, but wouldn't fix it in place, so we could run it under the stairs if we wanted to, so I ended up fitting it myself.

[JPB]

If anyone has unresolved BT issues, I can recommend asking for Theresa Stableford when calling customer service as she has - following a severe bollocking from her management after she gave my Dad some totally rubbish advice and also confused Mb/s with MB/s when discussing his broadband speed at the time of his signing up for service - been "retrained" and will no longer be blaming a service user's operating system for their poor connection, constant switching from their private connection to a public one from that wretched hub or general lack of knowledge in the call centre.
Her policy had been to tell users that their problems came from their not using Windows!

I know that Plusnet is now connected with BT but this doesn't affect me unless I transfer out of my current contract into a native Plusnet one instead of my current VaH setup. Still, at least they don't use their customers' hubs to provide free web access for others. Plusnet also manage to give me the same speed in MB/s as BT do for Dad in Mb/s, yet BT cannot explain how this eightfold imbalance can be so. According to both BT and Vodafone (who own the exchanges), we should both have the same connection speed as we're equidistant from the exchange and the connections are metallurgically similar. At least the old fella's moving to a better provider now, thanks to our moving his website from being hosted by his publisher to a new hosting service which as luck would have it is also going to be his ISP. Oddly enough, BT doesn't want any of its hubs back and they reckon he can use one of these with the new ISP. Odd then that they blamed the hub so many times we now have a choice of four to hack for the job!

[Luxobarge]

This is interesting stuff. Frankly I'm amazed that any of you got to actually speak to anybody from BT - how on earth did you do it?

We have BT BB, and generally it's been pretty reliable, in spite of living out in the sticks. However, on a couple of occasions we've lost the telephone but still got BB. So that immediately tells me that the fault is at the exchange. Nonetheless, I need to report/chase the fault, so I need to contact BT, right?

Well, it seems there are two ways:
1) You can report the problem on-line. So, I did this, and the first thing it does is a "line test" - completely unneccessary of course, if the line was down I wouldn't be communicating on BB!! So, it does a line test. This of course drops the BB connection, so you can't progress any further with reporting the fault. Brilliant!

2) You can phone them. Now that's fine if you a) own and b) have a signal for a mobile phone. I have neither. And I can't phone on the land line because that's what's down. So I use my IP phone, and guess what? Yes! They do a line test. Which drops the BB connection. So again you can't progress with reporting the fault.

This simply drove me mad - I completely failed to get through to them to report the fault. In the end I managed to start an on-line chat session with a fella in India, who of course did a line test. Which dropped the BB and of course the chat session. It took me several goes, begging him each time to NOT do a line test - finally I got the issue through his thick skull and the fault was reported - but I confess I became increasingly vitriolic and sarcastic as the chat session went on.

Perhaps they have this strategy in order to adopt a "head in the sand" approach - if nobody can report faults, then obviously there are no faults, right?

I think it's pathetic that essentially you have to have a working mobile phone in order to report a fault to BT - anybody know any other way of doing it, if your land line is down but internet is working?

[/rant]

[JPB]

Yes. Jump in your private helicopter (waddya mean you don't own one? ) and nip over to Delhi then walk in to the call centre and bash the bloke who failed to comprehend the nature of the problem around the face with a rubber chicken or something similarly non-fatal, yet alarmingly satisfying to use as a weapon.
Or keep calling. Sooner or later you will get through to a UK-based call centre - such as the one where Mrs Stableford works - where some halfwit, possibly even Theresa herself, will try to tell you that it's all your fault. Then you write to Michael Rake - marking the letters for his personal attention - several dozen times and, when he eventually tires of being troubled by the prospect of doing some actual work, you'll get a written reply which will probably include a small value voucher offering discount off the price of something you don't want that's only available from a shop whose nearest branch is seventy miles from your home, work or any other place that you'd stand a chance of passing through in an average week.