Hi everyone,

It’s been a while since I was last on here.

I’m having a problem with BT.

If anyone recalls we were flooded out two years ago at Christmas.

We had to go and live in a hotel for six weeks and then into a holiday cottage for about nine months after that.

Once we moved into the cottage I got permission from the owner to have a phone line installed.

This was at the end of February.

BT gave me the usual run around.

Telling me alsorts of tall tales.

Like ‘the reason it’s taking so long (6 weeks past the date they said we have the phone installed) is because we have to get planning permission from the council to dig up the road to put a new cable in so we can connect you’.

I wrote an email to Gavin Patterson to complain.

He was very good.

He called me at 8 am the next morning to talk about it

and told me he had set a small team on the problem to get it sorted.

the cottage already had phone sockets installed from a few years previous and there was electricity present in the sockets.

it should have been as simple as going to the exchange and connecting the line.

it took over four months to get the phone on and another three weeks to get the BB working.

Eventually our house was ready for us to move back into.

I emailed the people who had been dealing with the complaint I’d already made.

This was to make sure I could get the line at home reconnected for when we moved back.

Everything seemed good.

Until we moved back and discovered that there was no phone line and no BB.

I went to a neighbors and called BT who told me it was going to cost £130 to put a new line in as there had, according to them, never been an active phone line at our house.

Even after explaining everything that had happened and assuring the person that there had indeed been an active BT line at the property she still insisted on putting a charge on my account for the £130.00.

I went back to the email and again it took months to get connected.

ever since then the BB has been very poor.

The connection frequently drops or more often the speed drops from 7Mbps to 128Kbps and if more than one person is online at a time the connection becomes frustratingly slow. back to the emails again.

Tests were run and run but they said there was nothing wrong.

I took screenshots from the laptop and all our families mobile phones and also photos of our TV,

we have Sky Q which has most of its content online,

the tv keeps displaying a message telling us that the internet connection is too poor or of such bad quality that online streaming can’t be used.

I had set the quality of the online videos to SD but this didn’t work.

I tested YouTube and set the quality to 144p and it played ok

i gradually increased the quality until it would start experiencing long and frequent periods of buffering.

I found out that if only one device was connected to the internet I could get a playback quality of 480p on YouTube to play with reasonable reliability.

Now I kept on at BT because there is clearly something wrong.

It got so bad that they just stopped returning my emails.

I’ve had enough and I’ve decided to switch providers but BT want me to pay £260.00 because I’m still in contract.

my question is

Can I reasonably assume that I’m entitled to leave with out penalty being applied because BT have not provide the services I’ve been paying for?

Thanks for your help.

Cheers

John

yes failure to provide the service they promised

Do they not have to say what speed you will get first then dispute thats its slow, your cottage could be in the middle of nowhere. What speed did your supplier say you would get

Do they not have to say what speed you will get first then dispute thats its slow, your cottage could be in the middle of nowhere. What speed did your supplier say you would get

They do, but then (and all Internet Service Providers are guilty of this) they cover their own backsides by selling it as *upto*. So that they're never actually guaranteeing the speed you're going to get. It could be that there's an issue with the phone line itself, in which case, switching away from BT won't solve your problem, as all other landline internet providers use the BT wires and BT Openreach, even though it might be their name on the box.

It might be worth having a word with your neighbours, finding out who they're with and what kind of speeds they get. If they're all getting better speeds than you, then I'd almost guarantee that the issue is with your wires, and the only way to get that sorted is via BT.

So unless you're in a 'cable area', I'm afraid that you're a bit stuck. You might move away from BT, but you'd still be using BT wires and (probably) BT exchange equipment, so speeds won't improve no matter which ISP you're with. The only difference may be that your new ISP might be able to push BT Openreach in to getting it sorted, but then, that's not a given either.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2017-11-23-new-ruling-forces-isps-to-make-their-broadband-speed-ads-more-accurate

can you PM me your postcode please

and obv your internet was ok before the flood too?