BT are determined to send me to an early grave so therefore don’t want them to have any more of my money. How they survive I just don’t know, they deserve to go bust.

Anyway, has anyone experience of using other providers for line rental? I currently use Tiscali for broadband and telephone calls but I could use them for line rental. Trouble is that I think they are pretty rubbish too and don’t get me started on their call centres, definitely as bad as BT.

Or should I offer my services to BT as Chief Bossy Boots to sort the company out and remind them that they have customers.

As always, the STW Massiv will proffer shed loads of advice 😀

Thank you so much!

I changed to Talk Talk last August & am very happy, faster more reliable internet, free calls package, 10% off line rental & £160 cheaper a year than BT.

Unless you go with Cable (Virgin etc) BT will still be providing and maintaining the physical connection between you, the exchange and your provider so if the problem is a physical line speed etc one you’ll be no better off.

I went over to virgin £11 line rental a month plus calls and free cable TV which is why I did it. Not had any problems! (Famous last words)

as wwaswas says, only cable or a mobile operator can allow you to bypass the BT landline tax of £10pm.

Nowadays it’s getting closer and closer to being cost effective to only have mobile phone and broadband…

Pay my line rental to sky, because I was nearly in an early grave….
oh don’t get me started on BT cinnamon_girl!

Have a look at 02 – I have their b/band. Restricted at the moment to BT on line-rental but will switch eventually (don’t they all charge £10 p/mth??)

Found BT customer services to be shocking – o2 to be excellent. Good deals at the moment too.

I’m not worried about line speeds cos I don’t download. I have had so many problems when moving house that I had to start the ball rolling with officially notifying them they were being taken to the Small Claims Court. Result!

I have now discovered errors with my billing and am being charged line rental for more than one telephone line! Have wasted so much time and money on phone calls to them that I really can not deal with them any more. It’s not good for my health!

just have a mobile and mobile broadband then – I get more minutes, text and broadband than I can use on my mobile plan for £30.

as wwaswas says unless you use cable (virgin media) you will be paying your line rental indirectly (ie through a middleman like sky, talktalk etc) to BT anyway, via a process called wholesale line rental.

this process is horribly complicated for the middlemen companies to bill you correctly and administrate line faults etc.

The line quality they (and you) receive is often degraded, and add on services like caller divert, 1471 etc work, but if they go wrong its a nightmare.

From someone who used to deal with BT for one of the middlemen, avoid these products!

another vote for the just mobile and broadband here!

We’re with sky, no problems with them.

yer think BT is difficult to deal with, move to Ireland and try giving Eircom a ring…..

Do you need a phone line? A lot of people have a phone line + ADSL + mobile phone, if so can you make a cost saving and possibly remove a provider or two by possibly going for a 3G phone/modem and doing away with your ADSL & Phone line.

We had talktalk broadband & phone, they were so awful at resolving a line fault that we moved to Virgin. Who turned out to be even worse to deal with (yes sir, we will port your number – 1 month later and still nothing)so we’re back with talktalk.

No problems with TalkTalk here. £23 a month all in for unlimited broaband, and free UK and many international calls anytime.

wwaswas/timdrayton – may need to do the mobile/broadband thing shortly – how is the download speed etc.

The problem with moving to another provider is that your line will still be provided by BT, and BT charge external companies for fixing line issues, so the externals are even less likely to want to talk to BT (trust me, 2 weeks calling tiscali to get them to sort the line fault out nearly killed me). IMO BT are the best out there, they may have the occasional glitch, which you seem to be one of, but from a pub survey, most people with BT seem happy with them. If you switch fairly regularly you can expect problems.

Auntie C_G we are with Talk Talk as well. I will tell you all about it tomorrow.

Mad as a fish (all one word) Do a google search. Consistently top of customer service polls, proper per second billing AFAIK, the only company that actually provides it for residential customers, and doesn’t round up to the nearest minute. They can do all the normal broadband/phone packages. Cheap too

(sees another thread about how **** useless Bastard Telecom are, gets all wound up, has to take two Valium and have a little lie down…)

I had a variety of problems with BT when moving house, basically getting charged for things that weren’t necessary like installing a line that was already there and big charges for cancelling our contract (no, we’re just moving house). Got nowhere on the phone with customer services. One stinking letter and hey presto, all sorted!

We’re sticking with them because the broadband does work reliably. We tried someone else like talktalk a few years back and that really was a nightmare, and then when we tried Sky they took our money and never did anything else. Sky/O2 and anything else I’ve looked at aren’t available where we live anyway, so we’re stuck with BT regardless. As one of tags says, we’ve found them to be the best of a bad lot.

I’ve just gone back to BT (for years and years I’ve made the deliberate decision to go with competing operators). I was with TalkTalk for years for calls only and they were fine – the main reason I gave them the boot was because I got so fed up withcalls trying to sell me line rental etc.

One issue to think about is what happens if your phone goes down over the weekend or at night. make sure the new service provider can deal with problems quickly – remember if you aren’t with BT you can’t just ring up BT and say ‘fix my phone’. You might want to consider getting someone else to provide your calls while getting the line from BT.

Oh and IME 3G broadband has got a fair way to go before it becomes a real competitor to wired ADSL – though if you are a light user you might find it worthwhile going completely wirefree.

I’d be cautious with mobile broadband. I’m with Orange and it’s awful. So much slower than my parents’ dial-up. This is apparently because I live in a rural area and, according to their customer service dept, to be expected. It appears the Westcountry doesn’t get any kind of 3G cover, except in Taunton, Exeter and Plymouth (it’s still pretty ropey there). If you live in a big city, it’s probably really good.

It’s also slowed down considerably over the last couple of months. I’m informed this is due to an increase in users. Again, I’m told this is my problem and not theirs.

I’ve spent hours on the phone trying to cancel my contract but am never able to speak to anybody who can help. I wrote and emailed them yesterday morning, telling them I’m going to cancel my DD at the end of the month unless someone rings me. 36hours later and I’ve still heard nothing.

O2 Broadband…

£5 a month…

Then just get a mobile?

woody, no experience of mobile internet tbh, if i was to do it, i’d have cable broadband and use a mobile for calls.

I hear mobile internet users still get issues with coverage, and download speeds etc, but its supposed to be inproving?

Regarding BT, if you are sitting comfortably then i’ll begin, sorry, please look away if you are not interested in my geeky little telecoms rant……..

Many years ago Ofcom decided that BT should let some other companies have a go.

So lots of little companies sprang up who essentially resold the calls already being provided perfectly well, if expensively, by BT.

They just did so slightly cheaper, by bulking buying minutes from BT, doing some fiddly routing on international calls via cheaper networks, and basically making up the difference in inflated rates to international mobiles.

They did this by using a really stupidly simple process. You make the call, BT know it is "special" (ie not to be billed by them)call. BT know this because it has a prefix added to it (either manually or automatically), BT then route the call over the middleman network (of varying quality) to bill the call, middleman then sends the call back to BT (or the foreign/mobile network) to complete the call.

Middlemen companies are called Indirect Service Providers, they exist to reduce the cost to the customer, unfortunately this was made possible by adding on an inefficient, illogical, cheap to (cheap to BT anyway!) implement process….

I used to work for an indirect service provider (a biggish one) who provided broadband, IDA (prefix before each call), Wholesale line rental, and Carrier Pre Selection. I managed the relationship between us and BT, had the unhappy task of writing processes which integrated our systems with those of BT to make the whole swap over happen.

it wasnt a happy time, my favourite teething problem was our billing/routing of calls to a contentious area of Israel and itemising it on peoples bills as Palestine.

It hasnt changed much. BT still own and upkeep the entire landline network in the uk (bar a little bit in London and Virgins cable network obviously). So any other company offering landline calls and line rental, is adding on a process to one that BT can do already perfectly efficiently.

Its a bit like wiring up your high end amp and speakers, biwired with some cheap £2 a meter cable from maplins, using coathangers as connectors….

You dont really notice it too much on a normal call, but there will be lots of little niggles if you know what your looking for, and if something breaks or you get a billing problem…..

Bottom line is yes, BT are a big company and can be inept at stuff like billing and customer services, but if you think you are sticking it to the man by using anyone other than virgin, you are really just lining BTs pockets.

Even worse BT get paid for the call, but dont have to worry about billing costs or admin…

yawn……. back to come dine with me

I fell out with BT and ended up with the post office.

Unlimited Broadband with free netgear wireless router
Evening and weekend calls, weekend calls to mobiles, and weekend calls to there top 20 international destinations.
All for £25 a month with no line rental to the robbers at BT!!

😆

Thanks very much for the replies. I’m just a simple girl who assumed that with deregulation, lots of new companies would welcome me as a customer and would happily take my money in exchange for providing a good service. All these companies would try really really hard (with the inevitable mission statement) to be better than their competitors.

So … why hasn’t this happened?

coffeeking – totally disagree with your comment about BT being the best out there. Everyone I have spoken to does NOT have a good word to say about BT at all.

I am tied into a contract with Tiscali but, because I have moved house several times, am unsure as to how that works. Some small print to study over the weekend.

Don’t want to do without a landline but certainly see the point that has been made, except my mobile reception at home is not very good and don’t always get a signal!

Oh for a simple life eh?

Mostly it’s a case of you get what you pay for, the drive has been for cheaper minutes cheaper unlimited broadband etc.. so the margins have got so thin that the only way they can stay in business is by high volumes of customers with as much automation as possible and the lowest human touch (at the lowest wages) which means that when there is a problem it’s such a royal pain to sort out.

timdrayton – (a long time ago now I used to work for Oftel so I’m a bit of a telecoms geek too). Yeah network competition is great but it was never going to happen for large areas of the country (and I live 100 yards from a virgin main duct but hell will freeze over before they get round to offering a service). The indirect service providers are a lot better than nothing. the UK market is a damn sight more competitive than most other European markets.