Got BT broadband or BT business broadband? Don’t move offices or ask
for your phone lines to be shifted, because you could be thrown back
into the stone age of dial-up for as long as 14 days.
I own and
publish a business-to-business magazine from an office at home (in the
garden). I had to vacate the building while remedial work took place,
so I asked BT to shift two phone lines (one of which carries the
broadband service) to my house. When I returned two days later, not
only was the phone line that carried the broadband out of service, but
there was no broadband either. I called the BT fault line and since
both my telephony lines are business lines, an engineer came within a
couple of hours. We got the telephony back, but broadband? No – another
department’s responsibility. A call to BT business broadband; they said
they would have it back in five working days. We run a virtual private
network over the internet, so all activity on our database came to a
halt. I hastily reverted to dial-up and waited. Five days later, there
was still no broadband. I called BT’s broadband complaints service
again and they apologised profusely. And said they would get it back in
five working days.
I contacted a local firm who will soon be
hosting our website. They could set up broadband on our other telephony
line in five days.
BT broadband business complaints phoned 11 days after I had first written to them. “Did I still want the service?”
No,
I said, because it had still not been restored. Twenty minutes later
and probably by chance, the indicator light on the ADSL router came to
life and 400 e-mails poured into my system.
The following day, a letter from the chairman’s office arrived… saying they were “looking into the matter”.
A
BT insider told me that with five million broadband customers (which
they never expected or planned for), the service is in chaos.
My
advice is that if you use the service for business, have a fallback
plan such as ISDN. And go to a smaller service provider. If the network
goes down, it’s much easier to find out what is happening.
Gerry Woolf Editor and publisher Batteries and Energy Storage Technology
Email pged@pressgazette.co.uk to point out mistakes, provide story tips or send in a letter for publication on our "Letters Page" blog
