Rob's Blog

21/1: BT ISP kicked into touch for poor service

Last week our broadband went down over the weekend.

OK I thought.  Deep breath.  I'll call Bombay, Bangalore, Pune or wherever their call centres are.

I ended up calling them maybe ten times.  Each time they are extremely polite but constrained by a script that doesn't have too much leeway for diagnosing the problem.  What's more they told me my mobile/cell phone number and asked me on each of those occasions to confirm that it was correct.  That's OK the first time but it gets a tad annoying after a while.

They confirmed that they thought the line was faulty but then asked me to call again in an hour so that they could escalate it to "Engineering".  Frustrating to say the least but, hey, I could live with that.

They finally decided that a visit was necessary so we decided on a morning visit (between 8am and 1pm) on the Tuesday.  I was working at a client's so Julie waited in.  At lunchtime on Tuesday, Julie started losing it.

BT's line faults are now outsourced to Open Reach.  However, you can't speak to them directly.  You have to get Bangalore to relay messages to them or to relay messages back to you.  This is an Indian version of Chinese wispers.  Unfortunately, some of the messages coming back seemed to conflict somewhat with reality.  Someone somewhere was telling porkies like that the Engineer was on the way.  We had that message a few times.  Julie waited in all day and didn't get a visit!

The next day just before Julie was about to go out, a van arrived.  No apologies.  Julie has to cancel her visit.

It turns out that the BT modem/router was faulty.  Now you might ask why I didn't try and swap it out in case.  I wish I had.  However, the Help Desk just said the line was faulty.  The faulty modem meant that they couldn't hand shake from their end but they didn't ask whether I had a spare modem.

It turned out that the Engineer didn't have a spare modem either.  Not his job.  BT would have to post one and I'd have to pay for it because my BT modem was out of warranty.

Turns out I was sick to the back teeth of BT and wasn't going to pay them a penny more.

I had been researching ISPs anyway because I needed a static IP because I wanted to host my website and mail internally.  So I am now switching to plus.net at http://www.plus.net who have a UK based Help Desk.  I'll be paying £20 a month for a 20GB up to 8MB broadband service.  I get free static IP address(es) and a free Wireless/Router/Modem.  It should be sorted this week.

The other ISP I was considering that also have a good support reputation and also provide free static IP addresses are Zen at http://www.zen.co.uk.

Oh and while I was at it we switched our land line phone service to plus.net as well.  We kept the same number and we get free evening and weekend calls for a line rental of £10 per month.

So when I said we wouldn't be paying BT a penny more, I meant it!