Yesterday, I had a nice experience getting a problem with my land line sorted out. Many people have slagged off British Telecom for being inefficient or incompetent, but I feel tha on this occasion they have given me good service.
The problem was the the line had become very noisy, with crackles making dialling let alone conversation impossible. The ADSL was also dropping out intermittently - I could tell that this had started happening from around 16:00 from my IRC scrollback.
As I was still having some broadband connectivity, I decided to try logging the fault through http://www.bt.com/faults. Not only was there a sensible input form with a dropdown select with a list of reasons, but after I logged the call, I got the opportunity to turn on two features:
I had a text come through explaining that they had run tests and identified the problem. The following day, while at work, I had a further text saying they were looking at it - I let my team leader know that I might need to dash off home to give the BT engineer access to my flat. At 12:00, I had another text letting me know that the problem had been fixed.
So, full marks to BT for their fault service.
Good service from BT requires some yelling
ethan on 2006-08-13T09:12:09
I had rather different experiences with BT. After moving to my new flat, I had the phone line activated by calling them. This was a matter of minutes and it should have worked.
At home it turned out that the line was dead so I also used their webside to check the line. The response was instantaneous: Problem with BT's network. That was August 4.
Then it took an ugly turn. They announced that they'd begin with the repair on August 10! So it would have taken them six days to even start fixing it.
I was understandably a trifle upset and followed up on this through a form on their webside. There was no reaction. Then I did it again, this time marking my follow-up as a complaint, with a significantly snider tone. And indeed, this worked. They said they had contacted the engineer squad for my area to mark my outage as high-priority.
The next day a BT chap came around, did some line-tests but couldn't find the main wire for the phone lines on my square. The next day (Sunday) another BT repairman showed up. He wasn't a lot more clueful at first but in the end he found the main dispatcher box on the back of my block. He said that my line was probably never connected and it shouldn't have been activated in the first place. Fortunately, he found an unused wire and switched my phone onto this.
I asked why no one of my neighbors seems to have problems with their phone. He said that when somebody new moved in, he's probably given one of the excess working lines, which of course only works when a certain amount of flats are vacant on my square. In essence: BT is playing musical chairs and he freely admitted that for the person moving in, fixing his line might be more difficult if there is no other unused wire left.
Not that I care about this now. Still, it stroke me as odd that I had to yell at them for them to start working on my problem.
Redirect anyone's line?
nik on 2006-08-13T14:39:28
If I'm reading that site right it looks like you could use it to redirect any BT landline you want to a mobile phone number of your choice.
That has interesting security and social implications.
Re:Redirect anyone's line?
ivorw on 2006-08-13T22:13:07
You need to know the BT account number to do this, which appears on the phone bill.
Of course, that wouldn't be a problem if you'd already managed to steal a phone bill from the intended victim.
Re:Redirect anyone's line?
hex on 2006-10-24T21:26:52
Maybe that's one of the reasons why BT are keen to switch their customers to electronic billing (besides saving on postage costs).
