UK broadband woes – what’s happening with BT? And should we be worried!?

I’m increasingly frustrated, annoyed, and even angry with the systems in place to manage ADSL broadband in the UK. Seems that every ADSL issue we have had recently has turned into a complete nightmare!

As an example :-

· Customer has broadband with Plus.net for a year or more.

· The PSTN line is accidentally & incorrectly moved to new premises. Whoops!

· Ok. No problem. Let’s cancel the move order and reinstate.

· Phone starts working on the next day.

· Unfortunately the move has caused a cease on the broadband service. Which takes 5 days to complete! And cannot be cancelled by anyone it would seem! Why the heck not?

· After 5 days waiting for nothing we then have to re-provision the broadband service. Another 5 working days.

· After that 5 days we get told that BT have allocated our tie pairs to someone else (fan-bloody-tastic!) and they’ve graciously agreed to notify us in another three weeks of when we might expect to get an install date!

· So 12 days down now and counting ….

A one off? Unfortunately not. I could write about half a dozen other “messes” over the last 6 months – some much worse than the latest tale.

In short – the current broadband system is a complete mess and relies on interaction between ISPs, BT Wholesale, OpenReach, and 3^rd party Telcos providing line rental.

We mostly use business broadband services from Plus.NET for our clients – and apart from one incident earlier this year when they performed so abysmally that I felt the need to involve OfCom, we do actually find their business team to be very helpful & efficient. They are good at communicating with us and do seem to go the extra mile to try and sort these issues. But perhaps the biggest problem of all is that when it comes down to it they cannot actually DO anything to resolve the most common problems involving provisioning or last-mile faults. Rather they end up as an unfortunate conduit between the irate customer (me!) and BT.

So is it any better if we just use BT for the whole lot? Line rental, ISP, the works. Nope! It seems even in this supposed utopian scenario each part of BT is completely independent and you can look forward to service which is just as dismal …

And most frustrating for me is that we cannot ever communicate directly with those that are responsible. Not by phone, post, email, carrier pigeon …. Not at all!

In a difficult economic climate this is a serious concern and it worries me that our already creaky UK broadband service is going to creak once too often and leave a lot of us with some very serious communication problems.