I have a problem with BT that seems impossible to resolve. Last month I received an email from the company informing me that my service was about to stop, even though I hadn’t asked for my line to be discontinued nor asked to betransferred to another supplier. I asked for details as to who had authorised the disconnection; it was unable to give me any information.
I was told eventually that the service would be reinstated, but that I would have to pay a fine for not honouring my previous contract and would have to enter into a new one. Despite the unfairness, I agreed to this on the basis that I would be reconnected. The connection was set up two weeks later, only to die again that night.
The next day I happened to speak to a neighbour who had just moved in, and he told me that he had had his phone connected. I discovered that the phone number he had received was the temporary one that had been connected to my line. I have spent hours trying to resolve this – I just want the line working with my old number of 39 years. BT seems unwilling, or unable, to restore my service. I am at my wits’ end.
SL, Lapworth
Your letter shows that BT is still one of the most difficult companies to deal with as a customer when things go wrong – you have spent eight hours on the phone to the telecoms company. We have not seen a case like this for a while, but it was an instance of a neighbour applying for a line and somehow the BT system mixed up your phone line with their request.
We saw a lot of this a few years ago, but incidents had dropped off – until your letter. Happily, the BT press office appears better run than the rest of the organisation. Your phone line has been reconnected and it will contact you to discuss compensation.
In February, the regulator Ofcom proposed that telecoms firms should be forced to pay automatic compensation for service failures. As far as we are concerned, this can’t come into force quickly enough as it would force companies to up their game, much as the threat of delay payments has with airlines. The consumer group Which? has called for households to get £75 compensation each time their broadband connection goes down, which would seem to us to act as a reasonable penalty.
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