Now have three separate complaints open with BT. No service on BT TV a month after install (passed endlessly around their Kolkata call centre with everyone denying responsibility), Billed twice for installation and three times for Homehub postage, and now the final straw…

I get a call purporting to be from BT customer services suggesting that there is some ‘malicious software in my Home Hub’ and he needs to run some checks to remove it.

Obviously could be a coincidence, but on current form it’s highly likely that someone is selling off the contents of their customer database to scammers.

So how do I kick this bunch of **** into touch?

email their chief exec. my install was a catalogue of ****-ups, until i emailed him, he referred to his executive complaints team, and it got fixed in a few days.

gavin.e.patterson@bt.com

Ta. I can’t help thinking that their entire business plan must be based on recruitment and contract enforcement rather than retention of happy customers. Right now I just want to go back to the warm embrace of Sky.

When we were setting up our new London office a couple of years ago they were months overdue doing their bit, delaying everything and forcing us to set up in a temporary office where the internet actually worked. Utter shambles and I wouldn’t touch them with a bargepole for anything.

I get that call lots. I just tell them I don’t have broadband or a computer or whatever. They sound very confused.
BT wont call to tell you there is a problem with you’re line so it’s just scammers who have managed to get the details.
Just for balance, I’ve had good service from BT for the last 7 years, including a house move and line relocation.

Obviously this is the last time I use BT for anything. The only reason I went with them is that they were the only company offering fibre upgrade at my address. But they’re worse than…Tiscali! 🙂

I get that call lots. I just tell them I don’t have broadband or a computer or whatever. They sound very confused.

I know it could be pure coincidence, but seems very, very fishy to me.

BT are brilliant.

If you live just a few hundred metres from the local exchange, in an area with some of the lowest line contention rates in the UK, some of the highest domestic BB speeds in the UK, with proper FTTC (FTTH coming very soon!), and the actual ‘phone number of the main engineer person at the exchange. 😉

I can imagine it might be less than brilliant if you don’t enjoy those things.

once i got past the call centres and started dealing with real people with real emails and direct phone numbers, I can’t really fault them. The offshoring of the call centres however has been disastrous, particularly the lies / misinformation i was getting from different people each time i called, all telling me something different about why my connection had to be delayed.

My naive Dad had a call like that many years ago but they claimed to be from ‘the world wide web’ he ended up downloading their spyware just as they asked 🙁 They started by saying they had noticed problems with his computer which coincided with it crashing earlier…
I’d ignore that call.
We’re with BT and save quite a lot on BB, TV, mobiles etc through them. The foreign call centres are shit but the UK ones are spot on.

I’ve just left and taken my broadband to sky, I’ve got faster broadband, and the new sky Q, and I’m saving £50 a month!
I never check bills etc, but BT went up to £70 a month, and the line was rubbish….every time I phoned, they said the line was fine….they even sent an engineer last time, who installed a new master socket, and declared it fixed….only for it to be rubbish again(2-4gb instead of the over 40 I was paying for).
Within two days of sky broadband going live, it dropped out, so I rang them……they sent a specialist fault finding technician (from BT!) who went through everything before finding an issue in the loft…..he ran new cable and bypassed the problem and now I have spot on Internet, with loads of gigajingles of speed…..and every person I spoke to was in this country, therefore could understand my frustration, not someone a long way away, reading from a script. And before anyone shouts ‘Racist’, I never mentioned race…..but you know what I mean.

My experience of BT sounds pretty similar to the above – we had a crackling on our phone line and slow broadband. Despite numerous calls – no issues etc.

Switched to Sky and the issue was resolved (by BT!) in a few days and was caused by an issue away from the house.

I had faultless customer service from BT for my broadband, even from the offshore call-centre surprisingly. They had pretty good follow-up too. Only left them on cost grounds after the recent price hike.

Still don’t like them though, just on principle. 8)

When we were setting up our new London office a couple of years ago they were months overdue doing their bit, delaying everything and forcing us to set up in a temporary office where the internet actually worked. Utter shambles and I wouldn’t touch them with a bargepole for anything.

One of our customer’s business plan is providing short term connectivity to companies in London, whilst they wait 6-9 months for BT to turn up….

New Homepage

They can often connect within a day or so using Wireless links.

Had fun setting one up for them on top of Tower 42 – great views…

[url=https://flic.kr/p/pJdEzV]Installing VectaStar AP on Tower 42-003[/url] by Ben Freeman, on Flickr

[url=https://flic.kr/p/pK35ef]The Gherkin from Top of Tower 42[/url] by Ben Freeman, on Flickr

Well, after two hours on chat with three different departments this morning, they have agreed to cancel my TV service and refund me.

I’m sure they’ll carry on trying to take my money anyway, but this feels like a partial success. Only took two months as well, so I’m probably getting off lightly. 🙂

We’ve got had BT infinity broadband.

Booked an engineer to come round last week to move the main phone socket from a bedroom to the lounge (because the BT TV box has to be connected to it by an Ethernet cable – it can’t do wireless. WTF is that all about?).

Anyway, they somehow interpreted this request to also cancel the broadband contract and hence down graded us to the bog standard (ie useless) service.

No explanation offered as to how or why they’ve done this. Apparently the only way to fix it is for us to take about another 12 month contract. Promised a call back on Monday or Tuesday… still waiting.

Sadly the alternatives (certainly Sky) aren’t much better.

“Had fun setting one up for them on top of Tower 42 – great views…”

Lucky bugger! Very jealous! 😈

Worked in Telecoms, BT are no worse than any of the others, except Talk Talk. Everyone is better than Talk Talk.

The problems we got in Telecoms were usually down to a few causes. Simple line failures that were easy to identify and fix.
Slightly more complicated line problems that only showed up when it was wet or windy.
Outside inteference issues that were a comlpete git to identify, if you’ve ever needed an Openreach REIN engineer you’ll know that.
A significant amount of problems with customer wiring or equipment that has always worked, honest guv.

The tip from one of our directors in Telecoms. “The industry is sh!t so you don’t have to put much effort into being better than the industry average.” Possibly known as the Virgin business model.

The smaller companies are often better as they have the time to seem like they care rather than the big providers, but at the end of the day the problems are always the same.

Go with who is cheapest and gives you the best for your cash was the tip I took away from that job.

As a bit of alternative view, my BT line went off a few weeks ago, no dial tone. Internet was still on, quick line test on the website, problem identified and logged, came home next day and a voicemail from a BT engineer that they’d fixed the problem.

PS: We had a similar microwave provider to that London one for our area. Pretty good and quick service until everyone found out and it had a difficult time with more orders than it could cope with 🙂

The problem seems to centre around some kind of multicast technology for the TV channels that no-one in their technical support seems to understand. The engineer certainly had no idea where to start. Half the time I spent half the call explaining to the operative why a failure to receive internet channels on a tv box might be an issue with the broadband. Of course their broadband technical support didn’t want to know.

Gave up in the end and made myself enough of a nuisance, threatened them with Ombudsman etc that they realised it was easier just to let me go. Truly the worst customer service I’ve ever experienced. And I’ve had dealings with Tiscali.

Sounds like you may be better off out of it as that really does smell of bullshit.

Been out of the industry over a year so I may be wrong. I thought multicast in relation to BT TV was more of a thing at the exchange side. It’s a bandwidth saving method on the backbone network to avoid sending a repeat TV stream to multiple destinations through some IP related trickery.

It should be a simple yes\no check before ordering, if you don’t have it you’re limited to traditional bandwidth hogging video on demand type stuff.

Probably unecessary info now but wonder if that’s what was confusing broadband support?

Hope it all goes well with the new provider.

That makes sense. The engineer wanted to get Openreach back in to check what was actually available down the line. Obviously BT didn’t bother reading his report and doing anything like that.

There was a related issue which seemed suspicious – it’s FTTP but the landline was still coming through the old master socket. Installer said it should be passing through the Openreach modem, and had to be switched over at the exchange. Wouldn’t be surprised if they just hadn’t switched on some other aspect of the service.

Lost patience trying to sort it though, just wanted out.

Hope it all goes well with the new provider.

Already back with Sky at a reduced price. Just simpler really.

BT will probably switch my broadband off tomorrow.

If it helps anyone in future, the BT HH’s do use mcast for TV channels, as said above- if that doesn’t work, you’ll not get their TVoIP service.

The routers themselves work as a multicast proxy for the service.

If its not working, its always worth directly connecting the TV box to the router via ethernet, with no additional switching hardware inbetween. If you’ve got access to any kind of network sniffer, dump traffic to it to see if you’re seeing the right kind of traffic. The HH’s do the join/leave side of things, which is a pain for analysis.

As a further test, directly connect a PC running VLC to the HH and open a stream: by:
‘File’
‘Open Network’
‘Open RTP/UDP Stream’
Select ‘RTP’ and ‘Multicast’, IP of 234.81.130.4, port of 5802.

Anyone want to buy a brand new boxed Home Hub 5 or BT TV Freeview recorder? BT sent me three of each in the end. I didn’t even bother unboxing the last set. 😀

I vaguely recall that during their ‘x hundreds of customers are coming back to BT’ campaign from a few years ago that over twice that number were leaving in the same time period, which was quite embarrassing when it came out in the news! They truly are an awful company if you need to access their customer services.

I got as far as sorting court dates & paperwork a few years ago before they sorted their act out. Asking them for an address for the summons may have helped….

We recently swapped from BT 72meg to Vodafone 36meg and everything is much faster. Can stream 4k and even web pages load faster. Vodafone customer service was great.

BT would have to be free for me to consider using them again. Openreach really does need to be split off as a separate company, even if it means 6 months of even worse service whilst they find their feet.

Another call from ‘BT Technical department’ (somewhere in Asia) this morning to tell me about all the viruses on my internet connection. 🙄

Obviously it might be wholly unconnected to having dealings with BT customer service in Kolkata…

Shit company, shit customer service department whose staff sell your details to scammers.

It’s nothing to do with BT.

I’ve never had a scam call of this type before two months ago when I moved to BT. Both callers named themselves as BT technical support. So whoever is doing it knows I have a BT broadband connection.

Too much of a coincidence in my view to exclude the possibility that BT’s customer data may not be secure.

Drac has it, the scammers just pick a company name they know is likely to be trusted, Microsoft is another one they use.

Did they introduce themselves as Gerald or Stephen too? I’m betting they’re not really called Gerald or Stephen.

You signed up with a new provider when leaving BT, 50/50 chance that someone in the new company has sold your data. More likely it’s come from elsewhere though.

I’ve never had one for 2 years now and I’m with BT. I’m sure I’ll get one this afternoon now. 😕

Oh wait I had the car accidents ones toward the end of last year.

Of course that’s a possibility. But having experienced the incompetence of BT’s outsourced customer service operation, I’m not inclined to be that trusting. Should have asked the bloke to confirm my name and acc number, as in the TalkTalk breach a couple of years ago, but was too busy taking the piss!

When i was working for a big IT corporate there was a phrase that was something like ‘You’ll never get sacked for buying BT and HP’. Certainly with BT i’m not so sure that is true anymore. Every SINGLE one of my projects i’ve rolled out where BT are providing the comms has failed due to their incompetence. I now use a variety of smaller suppliers and things are much better because they want the business and they give the impression that they want to look after the customer (me).

I try and avoid them like the plague now.

Aaaand. Another one! Drac may well be right though, as the caller didn’t know my name.

Getting to be a bit of a pain in the arse though.

You signed up with a new provider when leaving BT, 50/50 chance that someone in the new company has sold your data. More likely it’s come from elsewhere though.

Haven’t left BT Broadband yet, just ditched their pisspoor TV offering.

I was thinking of leaving Virgin to go back to BT but with this thread…

Does anyone who has posted here object if I send BT a link to this and ask them to respond and address my fears around their service quality?

By all means. Do you think they’ll bother replying?

By all means WorldClassAccident, I can confirm I’ve had good service from BT, I don’t get many spam calls, those I did were most likely thanks to Barclaycard as I left a ticky box unticked by mistake on their website.

There are issues with orders with all the suppliers and they’re all as good or bad as each other. Problem with t’internet is you hear about it being bad. Quite sure that OPs original problem has been a customer care cock up from start to end.

I don’t think it’s any more of a damning conclusion than similar problems with Virgin, Sky, KCOM or anyone else.

It’s a broken industry with fake competition, not unlike the energy industry or railways. Pretty much any public service that has been sold off for profit really.

Slight hijack…. @clodhopper

FTTH coming very soon!

Is it? I “need” more speed. Alright, I don’t, but I like the idea of eliminating the wobbly bit of copper from the equation.

WCA – as a former BT customer I’d be interested in their response, if you get one.

Thread revival!

So I’ve had a letter from BT putting their prices up. Obviously I’m seeing this as an opportunity to kick them into touch early. Has anyone done similar?

I used VM’s price rises as a way to negotiate a better deal. Could have left as well.

Well, that’s interesting. Despite having BT Fibre already, no other provider can give me fibre so it looks like BT can abuse their monopoly position for a bit longer.

Not even a reseller like PlusNet?