Back online again with no thanks to BT

My internet went down last Friday. I phoned BT on the Saturday they said everything is fine, after spending ages talking to patronising Indians. They kept trying to fob me off with my equipment was faulty, I knew damn well there was nothing wrong with my router. I later prooved this by trying another router and connecting straigt to the wall socket (with a new microfilter).

BT said it would take 14 days to investigate so I decided just to cancel it and change ISP. The new ISP is up and working now with my faulty equipment.

I am paying well over the odds at the moment though so I will need to change ISP again in three months time when this contract runs out.

 

I must admit the few times I have had to speak with BT, I have not understood a thing the people on the other end are saying.

I do not mean to sound rude in any way, but at the end of the day the English accent is far far away from the Indian one and I wonder how the elderly etc get on dealing with this.

 

The problem is I am not even convinced they know English that well. If it was an English person I could have simply said "I have pinged the router and everything is fine but the self diagnoses check says the PPP layer is down, which is a problem with the ISP not my router".

I tried telling the Indian that but all I got was "We cannot support routers not provided by BT".

Clearly none my equipment is faulty and I think we should get a part refund from BT otherwise we will be paying for broadband twice this month.

 

Try pipex dial perhaps? great service so far, and no indian call centres.

 

I think I tried Pipex, there was somthing which frustrated me when phoning up their sales people. I think it was the constant waiting to get to speak to an advisor. With the company I am with now Abel I have a direct phone number to different staff and I know their names but it seems you have to pay for that.

I also tried Plusnet which said it would take around 10 days which was too slow for me.

 

The problem isn't the location of the call centre, or the nationality of the people in it. It's the training of the call centre staff which makes them only slighly more useful than an automated telephone menu. 14 days to "look at" a problem is totally out of order! I thought things were bad in Portugal when Portugal Telecom told me it could take 48 hours to resolve a problem.

Michael.

 

I had a problem when I got connected to onetel (using dialup) and I got my details (id and passwword) but when I asked them for a telephone number the indian guy didn't have a clue what I was going on about..!!

in the end I used the number that was already on my pc (my ex used it and left the details on!) - so I was able to dial in....shame I wasn't able to use her ID and password tho..

 

Yep, as far as BT were concerned I have faulty equipment I knew for a fact all my equipment was working fine.

Having said that my VOIP is currently causing me problems, the router keeps crashing every time I use my VOIP phone. I am hoping its just the settings.

 

Portugal Telecom also tried the "faulty equipment" line on me. You need to request to talk to someone who actually knows what a router and TCP/IP is and isn't reading a flowchart with pre-prepared answers.

It's the same story with all IT support. The number of times I've wanted to say "LOOK YOU IGNORANT F*CK I KNOW WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT SO CUT THE CR@P AND SORT OUT THE PROBLEM"....and have had to bite by tongue as that approach was unlikely to work....

Michael.