The Horror Of British Telecom

MBCook writes "'Someone, raised amidst the elegant lattice of custom and tradition that serves as the foundation of English society, came up with a very elegant, very British, solution to broadband policy here. And it absolutely, positively sucks.' So starts an article by Mark Hachman over at ExtremeTech chronicling his odyssey to get broadband in his new flat."

Comments

Should have checked his facts...

[taobill]

Which means that almost all of the ISPs simply resell the same BT service

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

Check your freakin' facts before you go slagging off the rather elegant BT system.

The bit that is the same is the DSL connection between your house and the exchange, and the virtual circuit over BT's ATM network to the ISP.

It is then up to the ISP in question as to how they link you (the customer) to the Internet.

You can pay a pittance and get a shitty connection with a dynamic IP address, through a transparent web proxy and have your web surfing go down every few weeks (or whenever it gets really busy).

Or you can pay a few pounds more and get a static IP address (or even a range) and no transparent proxy, and loads of back-end bandwidth so that you get a very reliable service.

Although I am not surprised that a foreigner wouldn't know this because very few Brits are aware of these facts either.

Re:What's taking so long?

[KiloByte]

Outdated ex-state-owned monopoly owning all the [local infrastructure]

Beh, it's not just the Britland that's suffering this problem. In Poland, we have Telekomunikacja Polska SA (tp SA), although the name obviously must have came from "communism" rather than "communication". Abysmal service, and no competition -- a cable operator would have to provide his own backbone as tp sa obviously isn't going to cooperate.

Just a few tidbits:

• when my workplace moved, it took a month and a half to get the damn phones connected, and a bit longer to get DSL as well. We gave them notices several times, the first time four months before.
  Our business crawled to a halt during that time -- but, there is nothing we can do about this. Sue them for lost profits? Hah. All we can possibly get is getting back the bill for 30 days, and it would take a 5-10 years long lawsuit that would cost plenty.
  And, the guy who does the real work for them said it's a matter of flipping a switch (as the cabling already existed), but he was not allowed to do it without clearance from the bureaucracy.
• the best connection we could get were "consumer-level" 128/512kbit ADSL for 160zl/month and "business" 512kbit DSL for 250zl. The sales rep claimed it's full, symmetric DSL. As you can guess, it's in reality just 128kbit upstream, same as the consumer version, with no value added but a different price tag.
• at home, I had a 3-week outage just because they had some "internal repairs". Sweet.
• at work, over half a year later, we still keep getting invoices for the old line. The customer service line just gives us a poor random clerk who doesn't know anything, and can't be told to escalate. To provide us with more entertainment, the clerks are assigned on a random way nation-wide, ensuring no two calls can reach the same representative.
• and oh, Poland has the most expensive phone services in Europe.

This post is pretty grim, indeed. But, as the brighter side, the rumors say there are people who live in Somalia and Sierra Leone...

Re:Let's review...

[PowerBert]

Actually I had a fault with my BT line a litle over a month ago. I called BT on Friday evening (from my mobile) and a BT engineer was at my house on Saturday afternoon. BT kept me informed throughout the process. At around 4:30 Saturday afternoon I asked the engineer what time he clocked off and he replied "When the lines fixed, I can't leave a customer without service."

BT's not all bad.

Re:What's taking so long?

[wsapplegate]

> Most of these problems would likely not of occured if they hadn't privatised BT .

I agree _in part_ with you. I've witnessed first hand the result of the deregulation of another telco market (the French one, with France Télécom as the Ugly Monopolist From Hell), and here's what happened :

• You can now transfer your local loop to another provider, either just for ADSL (in which case the signal is split at the exchange between voice--to FT--and DSL--to the competitor's DSLAM) or completely (in which case the entire pair is routed to the competitor's equipment--still not widely practiced). I understand that FT charges the competitors a nominal fee for caring over the physical loop)
• If you've a problem with your DSL (or, in the latter case, your entire line), you need to call your provider (FT won't process your call). This implies calling an overpriced hotline which often won't be open 24/7 (in some cases, it's a far cry from that). In turn, your provider's technical services will call a FT service called the GAMOT. This is a service which *only* deals with operators, not customers. The GAMOT will then dispatch FT techs to the exchange and report the tech's findings to your provider, who will (or not !) tell you what they found. If they weren't able to diagnose the problem, you'll be in for a wild ride, trying to get your operator to call back the GAMOT with more technical details, and hoping nothing will get lost in the process. The situation can even get worse if your provider uses the services of a third-party operator for hauling the traffic to their routers, since you know have *three* levels of indirection. And throughout this, you've no way at all to communicate with the guys who will really act on the field, or even their dispatchers, nor any way to know firsthand what they found
• To add insult to injury, some resellers practice slamming : they will happily sign you up for their provider (even if you said "no thanks"), thus grabbing some affiliate proceeds. Of course, since you aren't that interested in changing providers, you will need to get the slammed provider to retake the line, and make sure the slamming one understands they've acted on a false request and doesn't charge anything. In the end, you're sure to win (provided you weren't dumb enough to sign anything), but it's a time-consuming process
• Finally, there is wide confusion about what services exactly you're eligible to, especially since different providers have different standards, you'll maybe find that your line would support 2 Mbps with $provider_one but your $chosen_provider refuses to give you more than 1 Mbps. At times, the databases are also confused, your provider telling you initially you're eligible, then changing tune when they check with their operator's realtime database. Tiring. There even exists websites dedicated to checking the databases to find out exactly what you can get with whom.

On the other hand, before deregulation you would only get 1024 kbps at cut-throat prices. Now, most providers go up to 8 Mbps, and a few will even provide 20 Mbps ADSL2 with free national long-distance phone calls and TV service. So, I will stop short of saying "there shouldn't have been any deregulation", it was clearly good since it spawned a lot of interesting offers. But the way it has been done is quite stupid, especially the fact that you no longer get a free hotline in touch with the actual people doing the work. The market was stagnant, right. But the way it is now is more like "anarchy in the .FR"... I can see why they did it this way (avoid confusing the users with multiple points of contact) but the end result is that many problems take longer (in some cases *much* longer) to be solved. The most knowledgeable people still have a separate DSL traffic hauling contract with FT and an Internet service contract with a third-party provider that still does it (there aren't many that do anymore) for reliability (yo

BT? Dont talk to me about BT!

[willm5]

I was an early adopter of ADSL, which I purchased directly from BT. When they first set me up it all went smoothly - although it did take 2 weeks for an engineer visit.

Then I had to move. Unfortunately I still had a few months to go on my one year contract. But when I called BT to set up ADSL in my new flat, they were happy to waive the remaining months I owed them. Very nice of them I thought, yet when I tried to order the new ADSL installation they told me I couldn't pay for it with my credit card because only one installation was allowed per credit card. They wouldn't let me pay by any other method (not cheque, cash nor gold doubloons). I only had the one credit card at the time, so I offered to pay up the remaining months on the old installation to free up my credit card. But they wouldn't let me do that either. Several weeks of calling and being called back went by with no progress and I was eventualy given email addresses to complain to, which were just ignored.

I eventualy just went with another ISP, who were more expensive but helpful. So I am no fan of BT. And dont get me started on the time they routed my phone calls to another (unattended) number, then spent two weeks calling me to arrange an engineers visit!

All telcos suck

[Alioth]

BT doesn't have a monopoly on sucking.

I lived in the US for several years, and was in a GTE (which became Verizon whilst I was there) area. They sucked every bit as hard as this guy's complaint against BT, and that was just for voice (I used RoadRunner cable for broadband). Specifically:

- two weeks after I moved in, they disconnected me without warning because they unilateraly decided my apartment was 'abandoned' (yes, that was the word they used).
- I got disconnected *again* when a new neighbour moved in because they thought my line belonged to my neighbour.
- more billing errors than I care to mention
- abysmal line quality; in the middle of a metropolitan area, when I was on dialup it was impossible to get much better than 33k dialup connections. Yes, they DO have line faults in the US. They just don't actually fix them.

Then there was MCI. They had a whole new level of suckage. I wasn't even a customer of theirs, and one of their charges showed up on my bill. "Third Party Call" it was called - a $10 call from Florida to New Jersey (and I lived in Texas). MCI never did properly refund the money and I had to PAY Verizon for 'third party call blocking'. I had to PAY them to fix a horrible security hole whereby you can charge money to a different phone line! Apparently you can set up a 3rd party call by calling the operator and having the charge sent to another phone line. I suspect you do have to provide some details so the operator knows you're not just picking a line at random, what I suspect is the operator mis-keyed the number to charge to.

I also got charges put on my phone line from another random long distance company with no explanation. I could never get them to remove that charge, fortunately it was trivially small.

The Psychology of Attracting BT Engineers

[evilandi]

>>their engineers will only come out between 9am-5pm Mon-Fri.
>Technically not true. They have early-shift and late-shift engineers, and the former can work pretty early in the morning. But you have to find your way through the incredible, Byzantine, almost unreal tangle of red tape

...or...

When you arrange the engineer's visit, insist that the operator puts "CUSTOMER WILL SUPPLY BACON SANDWICH" on the call details.

I have used this trick twice now. First call of the morning (08:30) every time. One of the guys actually drove a 30 mile round trip back to HQ to pick up a spare part and come back to me, after being fed a bacon sandwich and promised more.

Seriously, you have to be aware than BT engineers get allocated a whole heap of calls for the day, then they get to choose which ones to do in which order. The ones they leave until later will probably get postponed as they run late.

Therefore you need to make your call the attractive one which the engineer picks first.

All BT engineers like bacon sandwiches. There are NO vegitarian BT engineers. You need calories and protein to climb telephone poles.

Next, the most important question when the engineer arrives is "Tea or coffee, milk and sugar?". Once you have your engineer, you want to keep him on your side. Your anger with the bureacracy of BT means nothing to him, if you get feisty he can just pretend he doesn't have the part and will have to come back tomorrow (ie. you get marked as troublesome and always get picked last each day).