
BT HELL
We had a BT sales call one Sunday afternoon (my gf was with Orange at the time). I had explained to my gf that Orange were a BT reseller in our area and therefore couldn't offer her the same deals BT could so we were in the market for a new ISP. When BT rang they offered my gf a great deal - switch to us today and you'll get unlimited broadband for an introductory price of £7.99 a mont, rising to I think £15 a month after 3 months. She passed the phone to me so I could confirm that it was unlimited, what likely speeds would be etc and once confirmed she signed up.
Cut to 10 months later and I'm at home and there's a call from BT. Now, I have to say my gf is one of those people who hates looking at her bank statements. If the debit card still works then there can't be a problem. Except that she noticed she seemed to be running out of money near the end of the month, but assumed that as we'd recently started living together she was just spending more. Then the phone call comes and it's BT asking if I can speak on behalf of the account holder. I said I could (which really shouldn't have been enough to start giving me details of the account over the phone but that's another complaint) and asked if we were aware that we'd been paying £150+ per MONTH for the broadband connection.I assured her we had no sodding idea! It turns out that they had signed us up to a 10Gb per month limit and had charged her per fekking megabyte over that. I can do 10 gigs in a day on a good day! It took 2 months to get it resolved and BT flatly refused to refund any of the money. That's areswipe issue number 1.
Issue number 2 was the broadband kept dropping out. I did some testing on the router, and also hooked up my own, nice and expensive router to the broadband and it didn't drop out once. I phoned customer support and got put through to an Indian fellow (could have just been an Indian guy in a British call center I guess). I explained that the router was faulty and we needed a replacement. He insisted there was nothing wrong with the router and it must be a fault on the line so I agreed to allow BT to do 3 days of extended tests on the line (I got assurances this cost would NOT be passed onto us before I agreed!), and thus 3 days of meaningless tests took place. After 3 days he rang back, told me they had finished their tests and found a fault and everything was now fixed. I told him that there was never a fault on the line as I could connect with my own router quite happily without losing connection even once, and anyway, how did a fault on the line cause the wireless signal to drop out every 10 mins or so. He then asked me to log into the router so he could "fix" the wireless. I did so, and then he asked me to "switch the channel from automatic to a selected channel because this would boost the power". I told him that the router was NEXT to the laptop and any increase in power would make no appreciable difference, that it was symptomatic of the router failing, as was the repeated dropouts on the line itself which I couldn't replicate when using a good and tested router, and that I was a network engineer who could tell he was just reading from a script and didn't have the first CLUE as to what might be wrong, as was evidenced by his insistence on doing 3 days of tests and then trying to claim the broadband dropping out was causing the wireless signal to drop off. He hung up and I couldn't get a conversation started with them again (and no, I didn't swear once in the whole conversation before you ask).
My colleague at work is STILL waiting for his broadband to be connected after weeks of excuses and outright lies. We have now been with Sky for 2 years and not had a single issue. I'm pretty sure their customer services won't be much better (from listening to some horror stories some of my friends have related to me), but I will NEVER use BT again. They don't just try and shuffle out of things, they blatently lie, they try to treat you like a complete moron, and the moment it finally dawns on them that you actually DO know what the hell you're talking about and they have to admit it they hang up and you can't get another engineer to talk to you again. BT are truly the spawn of satan and regardless of how bad the others are, you need to have your head tested if you sign up with them.