BT fined £800k over lax emergency text relay delay blunder Britain's communications watchdog has fined one-time national telco BT £800,000 for failing to provide a revamped text-to-voice service for customers who have hearing and speech impairments. Ofcom said this morning that the company missed the regulator-imposed deadline – 18 April 2014 – to improve its text relay service. BT's …
Their text service is a bit flaky in general. My land line phone supports SMS so I do sometimes send texts to it. They don't always appear in a timely manner and sometimes not at all. When I queried it a year ago I was told it could take several days for a text to appear sometimes. It's not a service I'd rely on :-/
This is a specialist service for people who cannot use conventional speech telephones, to communicate 'in real time' with callers who are using ordinary speech-only telephones. A 'relay assistant' types what the hearing speaker says so that the deaf user can read it, &/or reads out to the hearing user what the deaf or unspeaking user types. Both users can type and read if that suits them better, in which case the nearest comparison is probably with a private IRC session.
It's a lifeline for those with serious speech or hearing difficulties.
It used to be necessary to use a fixed-line 'Minicom' or 'textphone' device to read or type, but the latest incarnation of the service allows the deaf user to use a smartphone or computer instead, which is a big step, and also uses 'text to speech' software instead of a human relay assistant for some purposes.
While I agree that text is a best effort service of dubious speed and delay. However the text relay service appears to be different animal altogether - which is possibly why it is getting its delays out in the open before the service even starts spluttering to life.
Using basic text as an emergency service would be totally pointless due to the delays and sometimes missing messages.
I had that on my land line in France some years ago ... it would read out the text messages ... my dad had sent a text message in English to my land line in France, the result ? Hilarious ... It did work for text messages in French, when you did not use text-message-style abbreviations, that was ...
Customers, again, no doubt, just like with the BT Sport fiasco (BT struggling to recoup the zillions they dropped on the deal, so hiked everyone's bills instead). Regulators need to have teeth, but time and time again with BT, other utilities and banks, it's the customers who pick up the tab in the end, paying double for extra poor service.
"Customers, again, no doubt, just like with the BT Sport fiasco (BT struggling to recoup the zillions they dropped on the deal, so hiked everyone's bills instead). "
Not everyone's bills surely? I don't remember it being made compulsory to be a customer of BT Retail.
Isn't that how this is supposed to work? If a company gets fined lots and has to put up their bills, customers move elsewhere and the company loses in the market - thus punishing their shareholders.
No of course not everyone-everyone, but migrating away from BT isn't always such a clever idea - a friend had to wait about a month to get an engineer to check his Sky-billed line because of all the extra layers of delegation to eventually get back to exactly the same people on the ground (unless you're lucky enough to be in a cable area, but that's a can of worms in itself I understand...). We picked a safe middle ground, going for Plusnet - part of the BT group so probably marginally quicker service in the event of issues, but with a certain amount of firewalling from the cash-guzzlers and certainly a lot more honesty when there are occasional price rises. Of course, we had to feel a little guilt at the poor b*ggers unable to move elsewhere - BT don't lose in the competitive market as suggested, their strategy is just to squeeze ever more money out of their dwindling customer base, rewarding their loyalty with contempt.
"one-time national telco BT"
Do you say one-time national railway? One-time national water supplier? One-time national electricity company? One-time national postal service?
Just stop it...
And if we can get the f'ing BBC to stop saying "so called ISIS" all will be well in the world.
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