I’ve written about this before – here – and here – but two recent incidents have raised this again in my mind and suggest that things have got worse and not better.
Beware – this is mostly just a rant to make me feel better! I stand by all of my original comments and am speechless beyond words at the incompetence and staggering woefulness of our national ADSL broadband & telecoms service …
I’m not having a go at BT as such but they are still guardians of the keys to the network (at least for the majority of the population) and have a responsibility to make this work. Either that or get out of the way and let someone else make it work!
Two examples :-
1. We had a customer recently who moved about 2 doors down the street. From number 3 to number 3b as I recall! Unfortunately the process of moving was fraught with difficulty. We had a 3rd party telephone line “provider” in the mix which didn’t help. All in all the customer was without connectivity for 4 weeks. Our call log on this job runs to 11 A4 pages and represents a catalogue of incompetence, indifference, and sheer bloody buck passing. That’s 1/12th of a year! And absolutely and completely unacceptable. Not to mention horribly expensive for us in terms of providing support to our customer.
2. Closer to home – my esteemed broadband supplier of many years (Lixxus Internet) has gone bust without so much as a wimper in the direction of their loyal customers. Things started getting dodgy a few months back with various DNS outages giving some indication of what was to come – and then nothing ….. cut off Tuesday 2 weeks ago.
During this saga I’ve had conversations with many of the “players” :-
OFCOM had “heard something about this” but only confirmed what I already knew. There was no practical help they could offer at all.
The administrators in London were about as much use as a chocolate teapot!
BT Wholesale refused to talk to me. Surprise!
The upstream suppliers (Opal/Tiscali) didn’t want to know – then did want to know – then decided they didn’t want to know again – then decided they might want to know if I signed up for a 2 year deal with them!
My chosen new provider (Zen) has been helpful & professional as one would expect from a PC Pro service award winner – but still pretty much hamstrung by the whole thing and hampered by the incredibly inept system we live with.
After finally getting a MAC and initiating a migration and waiting the inevitable 5 days it appears that Zen / BT Wholesale (I can’t be sure which) has now messed up the migration by trying to migrate me onto a service which isn’t even available on my local exchange – now I’m back to waiting another 5 days.
Meanwhile my business suffers because I’ve no connectivity – my family suffers because I’m stuck in the office doing things I should be doing at home – my recreational time suffers because all my photos/reading/music is online.
It’s time broadband was treated like the essential service it has become – it would be unheard of to be left without electricity for 4 weeks simply because we moved next door. Or with no running water for weeks on end because NI Water had some financial difficulties. The sooner broadband starts getting treated like a basic household service the better for us all ….
They tell me it’s complicated! Rubbish! In the case of the move from 3 to 3b – if I could have got into the BT exchange I could probably have done it myself !
As for OFCOM – it’s high time they stopped faffing around with a myriad of tedious and peripheral issues and got to grips with the real problems we face.
Filed under: ADSL, Broadband, BT, Computers, Technology, Web
I fully agree. It’s an absolute farce, and it’s quite simply because ‘Broadband’ is still treated as a luxury service rather than as an essential household utility.
When I recently moved house, I had to se tup a new BT line for the new house, and initiate ADSL activation in advance, leaving me with two overlapping BT accounts for a period of time, just so I had no disruption in service. Like you say, this simply isn’t an issue with the other utilities.
As it was, to ensure I had no downtime, I had to pay extra line rental and although I moved within the same village, I ended up unnecessarily having to change my phone number. Ridiculous.
I wish I had cancelled my line 2 weeks ago and gone for a re-provide. But BT were giving me a 10 day lead time on the new line – and also have to change my number. Then another 5 days for broadband provision. Talking to them again now and apparently if I stop the line and transfer it into a different account in my wife’s name they can do it within a day! Bonkers!