IT's NOT for YOU-HOO

A week before Christmas, we lost our on-line connection. Getting it restored took me three days devoted to making a nuisance of myself with British Telecom. Below is the text of a letter I am sending this weekend to Ofcom, the telecommunications watchdog, copied to our MP.

Dear Sir/Madam

I have been a customer, first of GPO Telephones, subsequently of BT, throughout the more-than-40 years since I left home to attend university. I have never had a choice about it because, in recent years, I have lived in areas where cable alternatives are unavailable. For the last year or two, we have been connected to BT Broadband.

On the afternoon of Monday December 18th last, à propos of nothing at all, I found that I had lost connection with the internet. The ADSL link to my wireless router (a Belkin 54g) from the BT Broadband line had spontaneously severed itself. The same problem had occurred some two months earlier when, after several days during which I spent a long time on the phone with the BT Broadband Helpline (based in Chennai, India), the problem seemed to correct itself without discernible intervention at my end.

Once again, on this occasion, my first port of call was the Chennai Helpline. As before, the patient operatives there ordered a number of tests to be made on the line, conducted without any engineers coming to our house and, as before, they found no fault. I talked to the helpline provided by the manufacturers of the Belkin router. Because it had been suggested that there might be a problem with this router, I next day purchased an alternative, a router by Netgear, at a cost of £79.90. But the disconnection remained. The ADSL light on the Netgear, as on the Belkin, did not light up and, because there was no ADSL connection, I was unable to configure the Netgear router. The Belkin carries in addition a light indicating a connection to a phone line. This too was dark.

I persisted with the BT Broadband Helpline. I asked that the sending of a BT engineer to the house be authorized. They insisted that the problem was not with the line. So I asked the computer shop that had sold me the Netgear router to send a computer engineer. They agreed to do so, at a cost to me of £129.

The computer engineer could establish no ADSL or phone line connection to my Netgear router, nor to a router of his own that he had brought with him. He agreed with the manufacturers of the Netgear router (whose helpline I had also consulted) that the problem must be with the phone line. I reported these findings to the BT Broadband Helpline. They claimed to have duplicated the line trials and that there was no fault on the line. I asked again that they send an engineer. They said that they could not authorize this.

I spent a whole day trying to take the matter further within the BT organization. One kindly woman in BT Customer Services did volunteer to refund me the cost of the computer engineer call-out and to make an adjustment to our next bill in recognition of the phone calls I had made. I subsequently received a letter over the signature of the Customer Service Director, saying that our account had been credited £149.00 on December 21st.

But the kindly woman, like everyone else I spoke to at BT, passed me on to another department that could not help me. I was attempting to locate someone who would authorize the sending of an engineer to the house so that I might ensure that I was back on line in time for Christmas. As I grew more frustrated and ragged with BT, I began to make it clear to its representatives that if my connection were not restored in time for Christmas, any engineer coming to the house thereafter would be doing so to disconnect BT Broadband. We would get by with dial-up computing and with mobile phones.

I was eventually told that the engineers would need to do two days of tests before any home visit. I gently pointed out that the line had already been tested to destruction. I asked again why I could not be connected to someone who would authorize the sending of an engineer. I was told that the engineers could only be communicated with by email. This was Alice in Wonderland. I asked to speak to someone at BT actually authorized to use the bloody telephone.

When it became clear that no one could or would help me, I asked to be put through to the Chairman’s office. This at least had the effect of connecting me to BT headquarters. I was not permitted to speak directly to the Chairman or anyone in his office as that office operates on a return-call principle. But I spoke to someone who listened to my case and who promised to call me back the next day, it now being near the end of office hours. With a short break for lunch, I had been on the phone almost continuously from 9.00am until past 5.00pm and this was the third day on which the lack of an on-line connection had dominated my waking hours. My shoulders were knotted almost beyond repair, my left ear hurt fit to burst and I had been cured of wanting to be played Mozart (especially down a phone line) ever again. I felt sceptical that I would hear any more – several BT people had previously promised to call me back and had not done so. One had even urged me several times to “trust me” and then had not come good on that earnest of trust.

The next day I was indeed phoned by something called, I think I heard right, the Office of Higher Complaints. The man who called me promised to take charge of the case and to arrange for an engineer to visit our house. He also gave me his direct number. Sure enough, he called back to give me a date for an engineer’s visit. It would not be in time for Christmas – it was by now the Thursday and I knew what was possible and what not – but I had a firm date.

That evening, the router “spontaneously” (as it seemed to me) reconnected to the phone line. I was indeed back on line for Christmas. After the holiday (but before New Year’s Eve), a BT Open Reach van duly arrived. The engineer, it turned out, was based at a depot in our town. He explained the relationship between BT and Open Reach and was frankly dismissive of the BT Broadband Helpline. He also seemed to confirm what I had begun to suspect and what other BT customers have told me: that nobody at BT wants to do anything for you if there's no obvious profit in it for BT. He said that BT are reluctant to call in Open Reach because it means a commitment to expenditure. And he, like the officer from Higher Complaints, gave me his direct number. He also found no fault in the house’s connections but he installed a new extension box so that I no longer need to use micro-filters between phone line and router.

Revealing that there was something he could try at the exchange and that there remained a possibility that our individual line to the exchange might indeed have a faulty connection at the exchange itself, he left. The Higher Complaints officer has been diligent in his attentions – indeed, I have had to explain to him that a daily phone call to ask if everything is fine is really not necessary.

My Broadband connection has not failed since and I have permitted the Higher Complaints officer to – as he put it – close the case, though I remain braced for a breakdown as unheralded as the last one. BT has, on the face of it, finally come good but not without my losing the greater part of the week before Christmas, a time when I could have been, ought to have been and would much rather have been preoccupied with other matters, let alone my work – which, as I operate from home, relies on my having reliable on-line access.

There does seem to be a culture of avoidance at BT. The recorded messages you encounter indicate that you in turn may be recorded for training purposes and you wonder what is learned from the recordings they hold of your mounting frustration. They give you a case reference number that no one ever asks to have cited. There is evidently no direct route to the solution of a customer’s problem. Operatives at Customer Services, as at the Broadband Helpline, are courteous and patient but do not appear to be provided with clear avenues down which they can guide you to someone qualified to address your problem. The franchising of Open Reach makes no sense if BT only see it as a resource of last resort.

I hope this customer’s experience is of use to you.

Thank you for bearing with me through a rather extended account.

Yours faithfully,

W.Stephen Gilbert


I shall report on Ofcom's response in due course. Meanwhile, it might be instructive to compare this experience with the correspondence reproduced as the chapter 'A Tale of a Chubb' in my book Common Sense, free to download by clicking the link in the right hand sidebar.