Internet connection rip off! Can anyone help me?

[Thirst for knowledge]

I have had an internet connection with British Telecom since last year. I live in London. It literally has not worked properly since the first day. Net it incredibly slow or does not work on a daily basis.

Can anyone recommend if there are any regulatory boards or agencies with enough power to actually help me?

Or a process I can go through to seek some help even if its free legal advice?

I have been recording the verbal conversations I have been having with their lying staff as I feel it has come to this point where they literally don’t care about the fact they are charging me each time I call them. So, I am just making them money and it feels deliberate on their part.

They send engineers over and they do nothing, as the problem continues. I call their staff and they simply read off a piece of paper and nothing gets done.

Any help would be great as my finances are dwindling and I am stuck in a contract with them.

Thanks to one and all.

[Bazza]

Tell them you have had enough and will be switching provider. That can help. You can complain to OFCOM which may get BT moving. It's a shame because I have found BT to be a good provider. You need to ramp up your complaints and email or talk to supervisors, not monkeys. Insist on compensation too for the inconvenience and cost of calls.

[bobman]

You have to go through a procedure and you can then escalate your complaint to the independent Alternative Dispute Resolution scheme.

Note that Bazza is incorrect, Ofcom cannot deal with individual complaints.

Full instructions on how to proceed are on Ofcom's site.

[Robert J]

Firstly you have to be 100% certain it's their side of things that is causing the problem - eg. if someone nearby happens to eg. have a video sender on the same frequency as the WiFi channel the router is on & is blocking it, it's not BTs fault.


To do a proper test, assuming it's an ADSL system:

Remove the lower half faceplate from the BT master socket. (That's the 'customer connection unit' and you are allowed to remove it / make connections to it).

With that off, a single phone socket is visible. That's what BT call the test socket, though the CCU connects to it when in place.

Plug the router directly in to the test socket, using an ADSL filter as appropriate & power it up.

Connect a laptop or PC to the router using an ethernet cable. It must be one you have used on another ethernet connection and know works perfectly.

Try doing a speed test like that.

If you still get very poor speed, there is a problem with the BT phone line or the router itself.
If it's OK when wired like that, put everything back as it was originally - except still using wired ethernet rather than WIFi.

If the fault re-appears, the problem is with either the internal phone wiring or missing ADSL filters on some telephone devices (or the ADSL router is accidentally being fed via the phone socket on an ADSL filter, which will block the ADSL signal).

If there is still no problem, the issue is with the WiFi side of things - try setting a different channel on the router, out of 1, 6 & 11.

There are only really three functional channels for wireless 'G' (802.11g) signals, and a wireless N signal takes pretty much the whole WiFi band. It may be that there are just so many local WiFi routers in range that the signals are all jamming each other.

That does not count for things like some wireless video cameras, Video sender units and some baby alarms, any of which may be using the same 2.4 GHz frequency band as WiFi, but not visible on a computer - to them it's just a 'noise' that blocks everything out..