So. My broadband is down for a month. This means the BT Vision box is down too.

I pay £15 per month for the BB, and an extra £4 for the Vision box. I work that out as £19.

What do BT offer as “compensation” £9.76. The guy went into some double-speak about how the first 3 days don’t count as the engineer needs a chance to fix the problem. Still.

I know it seems small, but they do this to thousands of people on a daily basis, take money for NOT providing a service. I guess they have to pay for all those call centre staff spouting BS and making up pretend target dates and team names.

Sorry just venting – I imagine al lthe other companies are just as bad.

Time to cancel that contract. Well, once i get my £9.76 !!

They are indeed a shower of ####s.

I feel your pain.

Luckily we have Virgin cable coverage so are spared having to have anything to do with BT….

Thanks guys, if I didn’t think I would be pointless I would write a stinky complaint letter. In fact I might anyway, as part of the recovery process and all that.

They are awful. They started by hooking the line up wrong, it took 3 weeks to get it working. Obviously they billed me for a full month.

But wait – it gets better.

In my experience they can’t count at all. Since moving, and joining BT I have been incorrectly billed for usage about 4 months out of 6.

Initially I assumed that someone was piggy-backing my WiFi, so made a monster password. Then I watched as the router counted data when all my computers were switched off, and the router was unplugged from the net. It has been restarted a million times. Sometimes it counts down [rarely]!

It was at this point I started to call them. All in I have called about 10 times, for over an hour in some cases, and been pushed from pillar to post and billed again and again. No records.

I always have to explain the entire situation to the call centre staff. I don’t care a fig that they are based in India [a guess], but I wish they employed staff of a universally high standard of spoken English.

They have NEVER called me back, when they assured me they would.

The line to the centre is crap [the irony], and after about 3 calls I finally got it elevated to 2nd tier – was told someone would “monitor the usage for 24 hours and call me back”. About a week later I lost my temper and called them only to be told the case was marked as closed. I had to start all over again.

Other staff have told me they cannot monitor the usage, it’s not a facility they have.

The last call was 1.5 hours. The. Exact. Same. Things, AGAIN. Oh, and the three staff we spoke to all gave us different figures for usage in the last month. The email I received was different again. I was assured that I would not be billed for >10GB. But I was.

Fork ’em.

The ultimate insult is that I am in an 18 month contract, and EVERY time I call all I get is “You need to upgrade to a 40GB/month account”. Oh, and a million pieces of spam in my inbox.

Don’t call, write (and keep copies) sent recorded delivery, people will lie in the phone to get shot of you. Also Twitter is your friend, use the BT feed to register your dissatisfaction.

So in answer to your question, there may be no limit to how rubbish they can be.

The one company I will try my hardest to never deal with ever again…they have the most appalling automated telephone menu system. Luckily my landline is on o2 now who were brilliant when my line went…calls picked up within 30 seconds and people who actually understood the problem, a joy to deal with (all in lovely scotlandshire I think). I will never be suckered to move back to BT regardless of how many months free broadband etc they want to throw at me. Shame as the OpenReach engineers who actually came were really good and helpful…luckily o2 dealt with arranging the appointment though.

Dealing with BT daily they can be massively frustrating. My biggest gripe is that if your customer misses an appointment BT will charge them around £100 for the privilege. But if BT don’t turn up the compensation is zero.

Hels – email the CEO’s office, that seems to get some action from them. Worked for me. Important to keep going and not be deflected.

Depending on where the fault was located it could have been covered under what is known as MBORC (matters beyond our reasonable control)

As an example exceptional weather such as flood will trigger this status when fault levels reach critical proportions

MBORC declaration has to be agreed with OFCOM and according to the terms in your contract will no doubt affect any compensation

Footflaps – virgin are also crap. Turned off my mates broadband instead of the flat next door that had cancelled the contract. Two weeks later it was finally back on with compensation of £4.20. Then came a £50 demand for a new connection that he had had for over a year. In all took 8 weeks to sort out.

Basically most large companies are crap at some point.

Footslaps – I’m with you. I’d say I’ve found Virgin to be quite good. Not amazing but as Cupra said, most big companies are crap at some point.

Virgin would have to be pretty flipping bad to make me go back to BT though!

I spoke to some chap on the BT helpline just yesterday.

He was a very, very, very broken man. I would not want that job. No siree I’d rather clean marmite stains off McDonalds toilets. I was briefly worried that he would either break into a violent rage or break down crying…. Possibly both.

I’m sure all large companies screw up at some point, but since being on Virgin (10ish years) I’ve only had a handful of outages, worst one being a few hours. Other than that, pretty flawless service.

If you think BT are crap, wait until you deal with your next provider – although none can be as bad as C&W (Cheaters and W**kers) were.

BT…cower of shunts.

We’ve had one major outage in over 10 years and that was a contractor putting a back-hoe through the fibre at Colchester!

I don’t think I’ll bother the CEO, it’s not that huge, just annoying.

However, I just called to see about cancelling, the guy made no effort to talk me out of it, but did say although I was “out of contract” which I think means they won’t charge me some silly amount to cancel, it costs £30 to cancel the Broadband. Oh the ironing !!

Yeah, I got that too – I had to pay to exit a contract I didn’t sign up to. I argued & eventually the final balance was reduced. I won’t go back to BT. At the time of leaving they also pestered for me to stay. The only service here at the time was standard broadband & they rattled on about faster service, until I asked for speed, they said 3 meg for my address & I pointed out Virgin offering 100 meg.
Had one issue with Virgin & lost a day or two, it was a damaged connector where they split the connections in the road outside & engineer said probably due to the cold & wet weather. Could happen to anyone & they gave me a credit, so can’t complain.

If you think BT are crap, wait until you deal with your next provider

I have – Sky and O2 have been a joy in comparison to BT.

hels – Member

I don’t think I’ll bother the CEO, it’s not that huge, just annoying.

However, I just called to see about cancelling, the guy made no effort to talk me out of it, but did say although I was “out of contract” which I think means they won’t charge me some silly amount to cancel, it costs £30 to cancel the Broadband. Oh the ironing !!

Nooooo, do it. It gets to their escalation dept and without them getting a regular poke with a sharp stick from their customers they will do nothing. It may only be a small thing in the grand scheme but the service they have sold to you is not working as it should.

We give in way too easily in the UK, the grief our US office hands out to suppliers makes my jaw drop when I go over, but they will not accept anything other than that for which they have agreed and paid. There are very few lessons I would want to take from the US but this is definitely one – complain properly, politely and with resolve. It gets results.

We have put up with slow and occasionally random Virgin Wifi and their excruciating “help desk” fir years because I will just not have anything to do with BT. Atrocious, and agreed, their high-handed attitude is appalling.

The £9.76 is probably the line rental that Openreach refunded? The Vision and BT Broadband are an add on and you may have some luck getting them refunded separately.

just a little addition here.

the openreach surveyors need shooting.

just had an aborted fibre installaion for one of my sites because, i shit you not, my building is too short.

🙄

i’d laugh if it hadn’t just given me a huge headache!!

😆

Just to add some balance, my dealings with BT and Openreach have been nothing short of exemplary. The line has never gone down; the technician has always arrived when he promised (in fact, the last one called in the morning and asked if he could come early); and the bill has always been correct.

This is despite moving house three times, getting a new line installed, and going to/from their fibre package. At my new house, the line was active with broadband two weeks prior to the official date but I wasn’t billed for that period.

millhouse, will you expand a little? I did some temporary cover for a fibre surveyor, and the installation itself is my day to day job. (business, not Infinity/superfast BB)

Can’t think what the issue would be unless its something to do with costs?

And today’s BT hilarity at our place – because of the probs we have been having across the site, the landlord (who also operates a business from the same location) decided to look at Infinity. Seems that, according to the surveyor/engineer chap from O/R, there is no fibre optic within miles of us. However, a contractor trying to trace the cause of the repeat faults opened a BT inspection hatch in the car park and discovered fibre optic cables. Arse meet hands!

However, a contractor trying to trace the cause of the repeat faults opened a BT inspection hatch in the car park and discovered fibre optic cables

Doesn’t mean they serve a fibre cabinet though, could be an older type that were provided to serve a nearby school or maybe a business that pays for its own dedicated fibre link.

For me VM fibre-optic was so awful that I switched to BT phone line. Five and a half may not sound great, but it’s far betterer than ten dropping to zero.

Mr Taxi is correct, there is fibre everywhere but most of it is dedicated links for business. Its not compatible with Infinity…it isn’t connected to the right box of tricks at either end, and it isn’t feasible to use it for this either.

Infinity is provided over a brand new network up to the green cabinets, then pretty much all of it is back to the existing copper to your house.7

Despite working for them and getting a brief bit of overtime doing the superfast broadband, they are also not in my best books. They cocked up providing my broadband when I moved, it keeps dropping out daily, and they only bothered doing half my estate when they installed infinity. My street isn’t included yet I pass the shiny new cab at the end of the street every day 🙁

Mucho Ta folks – off to hunt down green boxes in the morning, a glimmer of hope remains. 😀

Spooky.

Apparently, Minimum installation height for an overhead cable over a commercial property = 5.9m
Our property = 5.6m so they couldn’t install at the correct height, hence the abort.

Ahh…too low, not too short! You’ll be getting a new pole, or an underground feed then.

Yes you are right, some people are very rubbish, whatever words they promise during installation,at the end of day they fail to stand on those words.

I deal with BT on a corporate level pretty much daily. They have some excellent people working for them, but generally they are lost in a sea of ineptitude. I never cease to be amazed by what new ‘challenges’ they throw my way