We should, note the emphasis on the word ‘should’ have had BT Infinity installed today. The engineer called at eight thirty to say he was at the street cabinet and would be turning our line off for a short while and would then be coming to the house to make the final connection and set up the new hub…..Woo hoo its really happening I thought. An hour later the line hadn’t gone off and not a word from the engineer, then I get another call saying the cabinet was an ‘old Midland’ and he was struggling to find our cable but he would be with me in the next ten minutes. Sure enough he turned up. He explained that the old cabinets had a shit load of wires everywhere and he was struggling to get the right cable as the sounding was very faint so he was going to plug in some gadget into our socket that would send a better sound and enable him to find the right needle in the haystack. Before doing that he plugged a box into the socket to check the line, once done he asked me to come and have a look, all I could see was a load of X’s which he explained should be ticks meaning the line was so full of faults that he couldn’t connect the fibre line, and would have to get someone else out to fix all the faults, Earth and insulation being two of the issues I can remember him mentioning. He then went outside to make a phone call. On his return he said he had reported the faults but couldn’t say when they would be fixed, might be today, might be tomorrow, and might not be till next week. How will I know when its fixed I asked, will BT call me ? To which he said I doubt it and anyway someone will have to come back to connect the fibre at the cabinet as the line fixer won’t do the cabinet Infinity connection. Trying really hard not to show how pissed off I was I politely asked him ‘ so what’s the next move then’ to which he smiled and said he didn’t know but would have to move onto the next job but sorry for wasting my time. Before he left he showed me how to install the new Infinity socket and hub (to save him or someone else having to come into the house again to make the house connection) so not for my benefit then! We called BT this evening to see what the situation was and guess what………no line fault reported, and no information on when it will be fixed or when the fibre connection would/could be made. I give up, I have far more important things that need attention so I guess I will have to let nature take its course and fight for the return of Infinity extra charges (I bet they have started charging for it from today) another day. Back to the title…. Why I am not surprised, don’t you just love customer service? Rant not even remotely over..
My Infinity lasted five days of working brilliantly, then we lost it and the phone line. Nothing coming in, nothing going out. Went online via mobile to check the line and it just kept coming back 'testing line', all evening. Next day at work I checked my email and had one saying there was a fault 'somewhere near the property' and despite them having my mobile number they reported 'We tried to phone the number for the account and got no reply.' ? This was now a Thursday and the email reported that the fault would be rectified by midnight on the following Tuesday. Which seemed an awfully long time to me. As it happened the line came back mid morning on the Saturday. Now, I know sod all about telecommunications but, considering how many engineers are currently working in the village doing new installs and correlating what the engineer who repaired the last fault (Christmas) said, that the cabinet was so old and full of rot that he had to cut back the cable and emery cloth the connections just to to get some continuity, it doesn't take Benedict Cumberbatch to work out that somebody had twatted the connections in the box again. Just a shame it took three days for someone to notice.
My mum had exactly the same issues with BT when she was going to go over from Virgin.She had a feeling something may go wrong so she kept Virgin until BT can sort her line out.They told her it cannot be connected because there are too many faults.This went on for over two months ringing sending emails and umpteen engineers giving her different stories.She never had it done after all.Hope you get yours sorted Freedom
Mate, The Openreach staff that are in the field doing this work are on a hiding to nothing. Most are reasonably newly employed, the most minimal basic training and thrown out to the wolves. Most of your first line contact is offshore in India, with equally ill equipped/trained call centre jockeys, who again are on a hiding to nothing, and suffer continual abuse over the phone from frustrated customers. BT is a monolith that has done away with best engineering practice, to follow a model of customer self install (except Infinity, where they have to change the faceplate), threatening customers with massive call out charges if the fault appears to be on the customer side, even though 99.9% of customers are not technically qualified to work out the issue. ie cheap as chips policy. BT protected by Ofcom, not the customer in IMO. When my ADSL was upgraded to Infinity in November, the poor guy had only been on the job 2 months, he was fresh out of the front line in the Army, Signals? I asked, no Infantry he replied, no previous telecomms/comms training. He had a fault he did not understand, I spent 30 mins taking him through it, he thanked me and said he had a better understanding after that 30 mins than in the time he had worked for Openreach. They have my sympathy, they are the front line face of the company, but a lot of them don't even have much training.
Still waiting to hear from them as to what the next stage of my Infinity installation is. Ordered well before Christmas, can't see it happening.
Ouch...sound like BT is right paint in %$%&... And I was just thinking about switching form Virgin to BT...Not so sure about that any more... But motoGP...
Sorry this is probably me being a bit thick, but I thought this covered me for moto gp this year gutted if it does not. "Great News. BT have now launched their BT Sport channels on the Virgin Media TV Service. If you’re a TV XL customer, this means you can now watch BT Sport 1, BT Sport 2 and ESPN in SD and HD at no additional cost, see our TV packages for more information."
Kentblade makes a fine point. Without banging on about their reasons for doing so (blood pressure) BT have recently done a full 180 on putting fibre into my village. No announcement or fanfare about it, we wondered back last autumn about the large Openreach presence here, but nobody from BT put us, the customers in the loop over what was going on. Just before Christmas, a resident who is in 'the business' dropped a round robin email to the parish council members, tipping everybody off that fibre was now in the village. As half the residents are served by an exchange four and a half miles away, it turned into a feeding frenzy of BT customers ordering the new service. Since then there must be at least half a dozen out sourced contractors connecting people up in the area every day, they are severely under resourced for this kind of volume. The up side is that it can't be long now before everybody's connected up. I feel the infrastructure is going to show it's age though. The connections for our end of road cabinet are fifty years old now. So far we've had new cable between the pole and the house and new connections at the cabinet. I doubt we'll be the last ones to need it. And yes, every time we've reported, we've been threatened with the £129.99 charge if the fault is found to be within our property, and so far, it never has been. Perhaps, the next time, I will respond to it with by saying "If the fault is found to be with your system, you will reduce my next bill by £129.99 by way of compensation for embuggerance."
I'm still with Virign (not fiber) at the moment and think it might be staying like that. Waiting for BT to decide if they are going to dig the road up to run a cable to our place from the house over the road.
Both Kent Blade and Kpone are spot on. The open reach lad, whilst a very pleasant and helpful guy openly admitted he didn’t have a clue, he had just finished his 6 week training followed by a two week buddy up, our house was only his fifth solo job, and guess what , 4 out of the 5 he couldn’t complete due to infrastructure problems. He did however have a nice shiny set of tools. It made no sense or would achieve anything positive kicking off with him; he was only the poor grunt having to face the public and was as far as I could see doing his best. L logged into our account BT last night, I couldn’t be arsed, and found that a fault we reported in July last year was still open! No record of the new issues. She sent an email asking for an update, so far we have haven’t heard anything back. I won’t be holding my breath. Besides I have another rant to contend with today, when I get around to being able to articulate it without a string of expletives I will let you know what it is. We have yet another stuffy black tie dinner this evening and L has warned me to calm down and not take it out on some poor sap that just happens to look at me the wrong way. Still the bars open at 18:00 let the games begin. Now what the hell have I done with my bow tie since last weekend, and more importantly where did she put the blood pressure monitor?
L says I am being childish; it’s only a car........only a fecking car…….women…. I have been childish for 51 and nine twelfths of a year, I don’t see why she is so surprised.
