What’s IT all about?

Following my move to Kent over a month ago, I have been having some interesting times with BT. Every other aspect of the move went extremely smoothly, the removal people were very professional and careful, the solicitor sorted their part of the deal on time and without fuss, all-in-all it could not have gone better. Apart from BT !

Some background first. The house we have moved to is brand new. So new that there was not even a phone line running from the nearest pole to the house, merely a wire hanging out of the front wall waiting for BT to hook up to. This I was aware of and had even managed to phone BT in plenty of time to order the phone line. That call was fine, and an engineer was arranged to turn up at the house the day after we moved in to install a new line. However, it didn’t quite work out like that.

Rather that give all the gory details (they are in a letter to BT’s Customer Services Director !), suffice to say that it took four visits, six engineers and over two weeks to finally get a line installed and a dial-tone active. Only then could I place an order for broadband (not with BT, I hasten to add) which was due to take a week to be activated. After the week was up and still no ADSL, I called the broadband provider to find that there was a problem with the exchange and BT could not get anyone out for two more weeks to even take a look at it ! Spot the recurring theme yet ? And don’t forget I am a VoIP consultant running a business from home.

Anyway, having spent a fruitless morning on the phone trying to get someone in BT to escalate this issue, a couple of days later the ADSL was mysteriously active ! My frustration must have filtered through somehow.

To further complicate matters while waiting for a landline, I discovered that my mobile phone reception inside the new house is absolutely terrible. I can just barely get a signal if I leave the phone in a window and use my bluetooth headset. So even though BT did divert the landline number to my mobile, it was not a great solution.

Another frustration during the downtime was the lack of access to email. In fact, I drove 80 miles one day to attend a customer meeting that they had cancelled by email the previous day. OK, I should have called to check it was still on, but if I had had access to my email…..

What really gets me, though, is the lack of choice over who installs your phone line. If I could have gone elsewhere I would, but that just wasn’t an option. At no stage did I get the impression that my case had been escalated, indeed during one discussion with BT I was informed that as I had purchased a residential line I would be dealt with in due course. You get the feeling that BT don’t really get the new reality of internet telephony. The only calls I might make on the new line will be residential calls, any business-related telephony will be VoIP-based. Therefore, the line is only needed to enable internet access…and I fail to see the point in paying £40+ a month for a business line when I can enable ADSL just as easily on a £10 a month residential line.

Wake up BT.