By The Curious Scribbler
Why haven’t I posted a single interesting blog in the last eight weeks?
Well it has quite a lot to do with the arrival, on the pole opposite my house, of a lovely green box, what BT call a Cabinet, bringing fibre optic cable from the exchange.
The Cabinet outside my house attached to an optic fibre line
Having endured years of download speeds of 1 MBPS I was excited. I placed an order for BT Infinity broadband. I even bought a Smart TV.
Engineers came and connected the cabinet to a new optic fibre cable joined to a box on the outside of my house. Another engineer came and attached it to a pretty Openreach router which he installed inside the house. One little problem, a light showed red, indicating no connection to the exchange.
My OpenReach modem. Three pretty lights but no action
After 3 weeks the red light went green, and spirits soared. The helpful Openreach engineer came back and confirmed it was now working. But it needed an activation code. All I needed to do now was get it activated.
I have spent much of the last 10 weeks trying to get it activated. BT Faults thinks I have copper wire slow broadband which works. BT billing is charging me for installation of the fibre and the new expensive contract which they are not providing. BT Orders won’t let me cancel and re-order because the order is “Pending”. All routes lead eventually to the FTTP team ( Fibre to the Premises) who can only be spoken to after you’ve listened to 150 repeats of the “We are very busy at the moment, your call will be answered as soon as possible” message. Often , after an hour or two the line goes dead, unanswered.
I’ve spent 19 hours on the phone to various departments. I’ve been promised connection dates and callbacks which are never delivered.
And don’t underestimate the mind draining effect of the repetitive BT musak after an hour or two.
Today I took to Twitter to protest. You’ll find the strand on @BTCare if you tweet. I don’t know if BT has any skilled engineers or decisionmakers, but they obviously have a roomful of young people called Ash, Stephen, ClaireC, Alana, Kevin, and Pete, highly trained in emitting pointless platitudes in 140 characters.