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.

My testing of Google Apps continues, and one issue I have had has now been resolved. If you recall from a previous post, I had Lotus Domino handling mail, calendar and contacts for both work and personal purposes. Now that I am using Google Apps and Thunderbird for personal email/calendar/etc. I have lost the tight integration I had with my Palm Lifedrive and my mobile. But the synchronisation of calendar items between Google and Thunderbird has been solved…and the instructions are here.

OK it does not get my calendar items on to my Palm, but that’s not a major problem and I think that having my Google calendar in sync opens up a whole raft of new avenues, given it’s support for iCal and XML.

Now if only I could get contacts synchronised

…to arrange broadband in a new house before I’m actually living there ?

You may be aware that I will be moving house soon. If not don’t worry, it’s not that important to anyone but me and my family Being a brand new house, it doesn’t even have a physical phone line installed yet so the day after we move in BT will attend to run a wire across to the house and set up our new number.

(I must admit that arranging the new line with BT was a pretty painless process, and I even know what our new phone number will be before anything else has happened. A far cry from some of the business dealings I’ve had with them. Anyway, well done BT…so far.)

So, thinking that having exchanged contracts on the new house and committed to having a phone line installed, I called up my ISP of choice to ask for broadband, pretty please. I was a little shocked to hear that I can’t even place an order until the phone line is active, and once it is active I will have to wait 6 days for broadband to be activated. In a way I can understand why, after all it’s still possible that the house move will fall through or there will be a problem with the phone line installation. However, looking at it from a business point of view, wouldn’t it be better for them to sign me up rather than tell me to call back. After all, I may find a different supplier in the interim and take my custom there instead ! Additionally, I’m sure that some of the ‘paperwork’ could be sorted while we’re waiting for the phone line. And if a problem did occur, then simply cancel the order. How difficult can that be ?

The thought has occurred to me that BT would probably sign me up and enable broadband at least as quickly as the other supplier, but I have an issue with being tied into a 12- or even 18-month contract.