Since I have a campaign to get broadband into our area, I was thinking about
BT.
Now, my feelings towards BT are coloured by my experience with them. I have
used BT as an ISP, as a telephone provider and now helping them. Helping them
is actually what campaigners are doing; they are acting as unpaid salesmen/women
for the company. To pretend otherwise is rather shallow, IMHO.
I no longer use BT as my call provider; there are a few reasons for this. It
is cheaper to use someone else for my calls because of the nature of my family’s
phone usage. Another reason is the fact that they, so far, haven’t upgraded
our exchange. I don’t see why I should give them any more money than I have
to while this continues. I have also found, in my experience, that BT were really
crap at providing any sort of backup when my line went tits up. Their call staff
is generally treated like mushrooms and spout the most awful drivel when you
present them with any question that isn’t on their list of prepared responses……….
I no longer use BT as my ISP, simply because, at the time, they increased charges
practically every time it suited them. They also changed the terms and conditions,
they started capping users with time limits (and still do), and this is aside
from the fact that I could hardly get a decent connection at night……….. So they
got binned for those reasons.
I have now read that BT has lost over two million users in the last year, you
could almost feel sorry for them. I said “almost”, but I manfully resist the
desire……
BT is reaping what it has sewn. They have treated their customers with absolute
disdain. Customers are not given any facts that might be helpful to them,
they are used as a commodity simply because, in most cases, they have a monopoly
in the area.
When this changes, they fall over themselves to try and prevent anyone else
from getting a foothold.
This appears to be changing!
BT is now getting hard pressed on the telecom front. OFTEL has slowly ground
them into a position where they can’t strangle the competition and are losing
ground faster and faster as people realise that they can save money easily and
quickly simply by changing provider.
They have also alienated a large amount of the population by their stance on
ADSL rollout. Lets not forget that BT stopped the rollout,
and were faced with a very large backlash of bad publicity. They then came up
with their super wheeze of registration campaigns… which has also backfired
spectacularly. They announced the registrations believing that most folk wouldn’t
bother, too low a take-up they claimed. Sorry, but
now they are trying to claim credit for all the campaigns that have reached
triggers. The triggers were huge at the start………750, I ask you
!!!
And that’s without mentioning their own goal of Midband.
Ok, I’ll mention Midband… First of all, to relieve the pressure on their failure
to roll out broadband, they promised a “new” service that would have always
on email, give 128k, be available to 90% of the population when it was launched
and would be a cheap alternative to ADSL.
Instead people were offered a tarted up Home Highway
connection pegged at 150 hours (at 64k) or 75 hours (at 128k) per month!!!!
Cheaper……………well, you got two phone lines, and line rental is included, but
£35 a month??? Taking the line rental off, it is only £13 a month (which is
cheaper than their dialup), but if you only wanted one line, it meant you were
paying £25 for a sub standard connection that wasn’t always on (they failed
at that bit) and was capped at a ludicrous level.
A larger installation fee than broadband and a years contract… A fiasco…
While other providers were claiming that 50 users would make an exchange viable,
BT were claiming that exchanges cost 500k to upgrade, and up to a million for
some.
They have slowly changed direction and have cut trigger levels, especially
after it looked that some other providers were going to move in. The easiest
way to get an exchange upgraded was to get a cable company to say it was moving
into your area.
But, as I say, I am now a campaigner for BT. So, have I suddenly lost all my morals?
Well, in a manner of speaking, I have. I am prepared to play their game to
try and get broadband for my area. They are the best option so far. However,
I have equally no qualms in saying that I would not recommend BT to anyone
that signs up for my campaign. I will point them to a source of information
on ISP’s and let them draw their own conclusions. I also point out how to
change phone providers at the drop of a hat.
I firmly believe that BT should be stripped of the network. The network was
originally built using taxpayer’s money, and I very much doubt that they have
changed every last part of it. This is one of the reasons that they are claiming
that some exchanges are “unviable”. If they had invested in all their exchanges,
it would not take as much work to upgrade them to ADSL, for instance.
So, at present, I’m happy to go along with them, but only
until they enable my exchange. Of course, if they fail at that hurdle,
I will do everything in my power to bring them as much bad publicity as I can
muster and try and drive as much business away from them as I can. The nice
part is that, there are more than a few others who feel the same way. As I said,
you could almost feel sorry for them.
BT are now between a rock and a hard place, the
users are deserting them due to their stance and they do seem to have changed
their mind about their direction. So, its a no win
situation. If they do decide to go all out to help their customers, the customers
probably won’t come back for a while, but if they don’t, the publicity will
ensure that the process of losing customers will keep accelerating. Either
way, things are getting tighter at BT……..
By Ian Urie
