My BT broadband nightmare... turns out it should never have happened

parasite

ahhh ... having ordered on july 13, got modem and am connected on sept 30th ..

mmm

Tony H

modem arrived yesterday live on BT now , but im still on a one meg connection

RuggieBear

still no sign for me...

Tony H

you should give kieran o connor a ring , here is his number if you want it 014327103, he had mine sorted in 8 working days , only problem is he is not back in the office until tuesday but any time i left a message he returned it fairly promptly

mikeruurds

Hey Fitzdragon!

I'm glad to hear that you finally have your broadband! Unfortunately I am still waiting. I've been told that I will have mine on the 10th October at the latest.

Are they doing anything about the fact that you only have 1MB down?

Cheers

mikeruurds

kaizersoze

fitzdragon wrote:

modem arrived yesterday live on BT now , but im still on a one meg connection

Ring them. Thats what happened to me when I switched from UTV. I rang BT and they confirmed I should be on 2meg and my line could take it. The settings in the exchange were wrong. It too about 9 working days to upgrade it to 2meg.

Tony H

tech support told me i was on basic broadband , someone ticked the wrong box (not me ), spent 2 hours on hold waiting on cus care to tell them to upgrade me to broadband plus , and at four yesterday ,still waiting ,was told by that the office was now closed until monday , so ill get it sorted monday i hope
best of luck mike and ruggie with your connection

Wertz

Dan Druff wrote:

What would draw people to BT is the €23.44 (ex-vat) Broadband & Line Rental Discount, which should help a bit at curtailing Eircoms €39.96 (ex-vat) line rental, and those that are set up are happy enough. However I would hope those that are going through hell getting set up in the first place are compensated. I should think a miscellaneous credit of €100 would suffice..but its not very likely. These companies are instructed from above, and believe you me, BT Ireland takes its orders cap in hand, and runs with them..even to the detriment of the customers so it would seem.

Now it's funny you should mention that...this so called BB & Line renatl discount...I switched phone carriers to BT during the summer, I'd been with their DSL service for 2 years or so. Was told that I was eligible for the discount. Had the phone carrier switchover pushed through (after several calls over a month :rolleyes: ).
Lo and behold my first bill arrives (paper, after I asked to be switched to online billing :rolleyes: ) and no such discount has been applied...I have been charged the full whack for line rental (higher than Eircom lol).
So I mail accounts...told there is a problem getting it sorted but it has been escalated (there's that word again).
I let my bill slide. 2 months later I get my next bill...STILL NO DISCOUNT!
At this stage BT are saying I owe them almost 80 euros more than I should. More mails...more excuses more escalation....my reply was that I will clear my bill when they recify the outstanding issues. I received a curt reply telling me that it's being dealt with as swiftly as possible.
So I'll be back on the 8th of decemeber to rant some more.

All the above said, I've had very very little problem with the DSL product itself...the problems seem to lie in their accounting dept and the CS call centre.
Their tech support when I have had to use it were friendly and efficient.

Sponge Bob

Wertz, uncannily as described on http://www.btireland-sucks.com

merritt

Hmmmmm, this is all rather worrying.

My housemates got the free trial of four months earlier in the year - all good - but now the account holder is moving out and we are going to cancel the account. Alas BT tell me that there is a E100 breach of contract fee. we have the thing now for over 6 months - does anyone know what the oiginal terms & conditions were? Was it 1 year?

And by the way nobody signed anything, anytime.....

jor el

At the time of the 3 month trial it was a 1 year contract (and a forth month free). Regardless of signing anything, whoever signed up must have agreed over the phone or on the net.

If the person who signed up is moving out then it's up to him to pay any fees, not you, legally speaking. In fact, it's illegal for BT to even discuss the account with you if you're not the account holder.

merritt

Thanks Jor El, that's the info I was looking for.

mikeruurds

According to BT my broadband is finally up and running. I can't wait to get home to confirm I have my own DSL modem so I should be able to get on tonight!!

Any luck with yours Ruggiebear?

RuggieBear

mikeruurds wrote:

According to BT my broadband is finally up and running. I can't wait to get home to confirm I have my own DSL modem so I should be able to get on tonight!!

Any luck with yours Ruggiebear?

nope

sturgo

what can I say?!? I've had the exact same problem with BT. I ordered their so-called broadband and home phone services four weeks ago. They unsupprisingly lost all my datails, so two weeks ago I had to apply again. I rang them up yesterday to see how my order was going. The useless idiot on the other end of the phone told me my application was delayed, possbily because someone with a similar phone number has ordered broadband as well. WHAT THE FCuK?!? Looking at the previous posts the future looks bleak. Selling my soul to eircom looks like the only viable option right now.

I've tried clearwire. metro, ntl, ibb, smart and utv, and for one reason or another none of them can connect me.

mikeruurds

Sorry to hear about your problems with broadband Sturgo.

Luckily I've managed to finally get broadband at home... and it only took 2 months!

I hope you get some luck for a change Ruggie... it sucks being stuffed around by BT.

(Only problem is my connection is at 1MB and not 2...Doh!)

RuggieBear

ok.

i've been informed my line goes live on october 18.


not bad considering i ordered on july 27. :rolleyes:

mikeruurds

At last... a result for you Ruggiebear Took damn long enough too!

I've found Kieran to be very helpful and I have his direct line number now so I should be sorted.

sturgo

I spoke to a BT rep today. It's only been a month since I ordered broadband. He told me I might have to pay a deposit of some sort. He put me on hold and I got transfered to the automated queing service again. Some girl called me back, she reckons I'll be up and running by next week. I asked her what the delay was all about. She said she would find out and call me back in an hour. To my amazment she never called me back.

I've never dealt with such a bunch of idiots. If BT spent their money on providing an actual servise as opposed to advertising a fictional one, they might have a chance of competing with the antichrist that is eircom.

If I wasn't tied down to using a fixed line service I would have told BT to stick broadband and line renal up their arse long ago.

mikeruurds

Hey Sturgo

A week isn't very accurate. I waited 6 weeks till I was asked to pay a deposit (21st September)... I got my broadband on the 5th... so more like 2-3 weeks.

Once you've paid your deposit things move along pretty quickly as BT hand things over to Eircom... I'd probably have my broadband with them if they were'nt so damn expensive!

If the deposit isn't an issue for you, pay it and you'll have the service in no time.

Regards

Mike

Sunkist

mikeruurds wrote:

Thanks... :P

I just don't understand why so many people appear to be having problems of this sort. My mate in Holland had a five day turnaround time on his DSL activation... he thinks that it's atrocious that we have to wait 2-3 weeks let alone 6-7.

I just think that some of the companies pushing ADSL products have put way too much money into sales and marketing and almost none into infrastructure and support. My belief is that if you have a good product it'll sell itself. Excellent after-sales service should be the norm, rather than the exception.

These companies slash their prices and then appear surprised when they find that people start complaining after having waited an hour on the phone for a support call. Naturally, prior to making an assault on the competitors market share, massive resource needs to be allocated to recruiting sufficient competent staff to handle the enourmous amount of calls that will surely follow. Unfortunately most of these major market players appear to prefer to act reactively rather than proactively.

My €50 a month might not be very important to them when taken as a percentage of total turnover... but it's damn important to me.

I wont bore you with my horror stories about Eircom and BT, there are thousands of others out there. Eircom should stop advertising BB and sort out their problems first. Comreg are useless and should be scrapped. Irelanoffline are doing a lot but we're no further ahead than we were 3 years ago. I signed up for Broadband in Canada 8 years ago and was surfing in 48 hours, the Installer came the next day!!!. Would never happen in Ireland.

We need to do something as a concerted group, I sent mails yesterday urging Swisscom not to become involved or even consider buying out such an incompetant company such as Eircom. I wrote Mails to Sprint asking them to get into the Irish Market. I sent mails to Stockbrokers buying up Eircom shares telling them to read the posts at Boards.ie and irelandoffline.org.

Someone said in an earlier post that they emailed the CEO of Eircom and BT, could you please post those adresses here? a few hundred emails from disgruntled customers might help. Spending all day on hold to numerous people doesn't work, i've spent a few days on the phone and I'm no further ahead than I was on 24 June.

Let's hear stratagies that did work, I'll try anything at this point. I'm going to Eircom offices today to see if that works any better. I estimate that I have wasted thousands of Euros of Eircoms money by calling and emailing trying to get BB and it will take years for them to make that money back. Would you invest in Eircom?

Regards, Joe

dub45

mikeruurds wrote:

Hey Sturgo

A week isn't very accurate. I waited 6 weeks till I was asked to pay a deposit (21st September)... I got my broadband on the 5th... so more like 2-3 weeks.

Once you've paid your deposit things move along pretty quickly as BT hand things over to Eircom... I'd probably have my broadband with them if they were'nt so damn expensive!

If the deposit isn't an issue for you, pay it and you'll have the service in no time.

Regards

Mike

Pay the depost?

What sort of reputable (competent, even) company asks a customer for a depost (eventually) without laying out any conditions for the handling of this money?

Without apparently furnishing any receipt? Without detailing any conditions under which it might be forefited? No details of a procedure for having it returned at the end of a contract etc etc. This deposit lark is a nice little interest free loan for Esat.

Given the demonstrable incompetence of their billing department how long will it be before we get posts from people complaining that their deposit has been forefitted in respect of bills that never issued? (thats if the customer manages to find this out at all!)

How long until we get sagas of people trying to get their deposits back and being told you never paid us any depost or it was forefitted x months ago etc etc etc.?

mikeruurds

Can't argue with you there dub45... I'm keeping my credit card bills and the letter I got from BT requesting the deposit payment.

I'm going to speak to Kieran to ask for some kind of receipt if my payment doesn't show on my first bill.

RuggieBear

I am connected this minute to BT BB.


Exactly 11 weeks and a day after i applied

mikeruurds

At long last Ruggiebear! I'm happy for you mate... at least your suffering has finally ended. Did you check that you got the download bandwidth that you applied for?

rogue-entity

I am connected to BT and it took just two weeks for eircom to activate the line, and then I received the modem, nearly eight days earlier then BT said it would arrive, so they must not be all bad, BTW there service is flawless.

Jumpy

rogue-entity wrote:

I am connected to BT and it took just two weeks for eircom to activate the line, and then I received the modem, nearly eight days earlier then BT said it would arrive, so they must not be all bad, BTW there service is flawless.

*points at rest of thread* Evidently not.

sturgo

I finally got my BT connection setup! It took eight weeks about 30 phone calls to get my half-aresed 512MB connection installed. Everything at this point seems to be working fine. Unfortunately for me, my only option was to go with BT or Eircom. So all I can say is if anybody has the choice of NTL, Metro, Clearwire or any other reputable ISP over BT or Eircom, think very hard before investing your time money and energy.

The only positive thing to come out of dealing with BT's "customer service" is their "platinum" phone number. In other words you'll be put to the top of the que. 1800 924131.

Enjoy!

mikeruurds

sturgo wrote:

I finally got my BT connection setup! It took eight weeks about 30 phone calls to get my half-aresed 512MB connection installed. Everything at this point seems to be working fine. Unfortunately for me, my only option was to go with BT or Eircom. So all I can say is if anybody has the choice of NTL, Metro, Clearwire or any other reputable ISP over BT or Eircom, think very hard before investing your time money and energy.

The only positive thing to come out of dealing with BT's "customer service" is their "platinum" phone number. In other words you'll be put to the top of the que. 1800 924131.

Enjoy!

Thanks for that number Sturgo

dub45

rogue-entity wrote:

I am connected to BT and it took just two weeks for eircom to activate the line, and then I received the modem, nearly eight days earlier then BT said it would arrive, so they must not be all bad, BTW there service is flawless.

Flawless? Keep an eye on their billing!:eek: