Moved house recently and gave BT ample notice to move our line and broadband provision to the new address. They’ve cocked it up. In fact they’ve cocked it up twice. Long story and I’ll try not to turn it into a rant. It seems the previous occupants had the line unbundled, which is fair enough and exactly why we gave loads of notice, to make sure there was time to address this. However its become clear that the sale team at BT simply never instructed the work and have erased all evidence of our initial order (while generating a new order independent of us the day after the works was scheduled to be completed). The engineers have so far failed to start work at the exchange and the new connection date has passed, and now we’ve been given yet another connection date more than a week from now. Fizzzzzzzzzzz.

Anyway it occured to me that if I could find out who the previous broadband provider was I could move my account to them instead, and they should be able to connect me almost immediately.

So can I find out who the previous provider was? BT must know as the service will still be going through their exchange even if its a third party box of tricks thats installed. Are they obliged to tell me?

I wouldn’t – there’s a real chance you could end up in limbo between the two (believe me, i’ve been there). At least this way you can talk to BT, and you have a connection date.

hmmmm maybe. This is my third connection date though! They still haven’t actually actioned anything. We put the order in on the 28 Jan for transfer on the 12 Feb. They missed that date and gave us the 20 Feb, they then missed that date and now we might get connected by the 3 March. This new date is no more meaningful than any of the others.

Whats infuriating is the connection date arrives, its obvious theres no connection, you phone up an they swear blind that the connection has been made and the service is live and everything is fine at their end, and instead ask us to check leads, prod the router etc and after hours – yes hours – on the phone you suddenly get the confession that, infact, absolutely nothing has been done and that we are no nearer to being connected than we were nearly a month ago.