The story so far. ( currently using a mobile phone connection )

Current draft of a letter that will never get sent as it won't do any good. But it does help my blood pressure.

Wednesday 26 May came home to be told that the “internet” was not working, in other words the broad band connection was down. Rebooted router and PC no improvement, Left it to see if it would clear up over night, as it often does, no such luck.

Thursday 27 May 6 am not working still, so phones 0800 111 4567 and there was a message saying major BroadBand outage, so I left it. That evening still down so I called it in. Spoke to somebody who was obviously struggling with my accent! He assured me that they were aware of the problem and had been working on it for over 24 hours and that it would be fixed in 24 – 48 hours.

Friday 28 May still not working so I called in again to try and get an update, I noticed that alert message on your phone system was no longer on about “a major broad band outage”. “Ah yes there is a problem on you connection we have tried to fix it remotely and failed” was basically the response I got. “I’ll need to book an engineer’s visit for Tuesday 1st June” followed by a promise that she would call me back with an update on getting it fixed sooner.

Late Friday afternoon I called your “I’m leaving BT” number in the hope of finding somebody with a reasonable grasp of the English language. Spoke to a very helpful and pleasant Geordie lad. He put me through to the “resolution team”, they were pleasant and polite but admitted they had no way of resolving anything, so what is the point of them? All he could do was offer to call me after the Tuesday visit to make sure everything was OK. That’s not resolving the problem!

So if it is fixed on Tuesday that will be 6 / 7 days since the problem started. I really don’t think that’s good enough do you? The fact that your resolution team freely admit there is nothing they can do is totally baffling.

Your resolution team member said he could credit me for the time I have been without the service but realistically what god is that? These days we build our lives and work around having access. I wish I knew one of your senior managers personally so I could really cause him some grief and maybe just maybe that would get something done.

I had the same sort of problem with VM a few months ago. A major outage and they were out for a couple of days, though there is no point getting worked up because it does not help you. You end up more stressed than before and they still cannot do anything faster. I would just ask for double the time back in credit because of the stress, and then relax in the garden or do something that does not involve the internet.

I've had similar problems with BT, I've had the service moved between houses twice, and each time they've missed their activation date - and then denied the order ever existed, this meant they had to start a "new order" and I would have to wait the 7+ days for activation. Once this was in exam season - so I had no internet access for online revision materials.

They also tried charging me a cancellation fee of £25 at the old address, and each time I had to get them to cancel it off as the Broadband had moved house, not been cancelled. All I got for my trouble was £40 credited to my next bill and a thousand apologies, it will never happen again etc (though the SAME problem with activating the service and missing the deadline has occurred three times now - once when we ordered it, and twice when moving house).

To say I'm not enamoured with their service would be an understatement. In fact, even their telephone service is rubbish, I generally try to get my problems fixed by the BT Care team on Twitter - they're so much more helpful.

I'll be changing broadband supplier at the end of the contract.

I had a problem with BT several years back.

Nothing really happend until I mentioned in a letter I was also sending a copy of all that had happened to Ofcom.

Strangely enough I got everything sorted and compensation within a couple of weeks after that.

Give that a go.