The recent transfer of my BT phone line was a sustained farce, offering third-world levels of ‘service’ at a first-world price – in this case, a £124.99 re-connection charge.

BT suggested to me that it would be a 10 to 12 working-day re-connection. Eventually it took 40 working days. For the record, what follows in my account of the problems encountered, from start to finish. Today I’ve been offered a measly £11 in compensation, not even enough to cover my mobile phone bill for the period. Be warned; your next house-move may prevent you from accessing the net for up to two months!

The initial cut-off:

First, BT managed to cut off both my old line and my broadband one week early …

…First, BT managed to cut off both my old line and my broadband one week early, despite two confirmations from BT staff that BT’s “ECO” system was showing the correct cut-off-date. I then had to make many stressful phone calls to BT’s help-lines, just to get the line/broadband restored for those vital few days before my house move.

The home move:

I completed and moved house on the 17th August 2007.

On Tues 28th August I called BT again, to chase up the re-connection at my new property. I was told “you’ll get a phone-call sometime next week, to book an engineer’s appointment”. When, next week? I asked. “Sometime next week” was the only reply I could get. In other words, I was being told that nothing whatsoever had happened since I had placed my home-move order with BT on the 10th August. And that it could be up to a further 10 days before I would even be contacted to set up an engineer’s appointment. On Tues 4th September I phoned BT yet again (thank goodness for my mobile phone!) and was eventually put through to someone who was able to book me my first BT engineer visit (at last!), for the first available date of 11th Sept at 12-4pm.

The first engineer visit:

An Openreach trainee engineer eventually arrived on 11th Sept. His booking was for 12-4pm – but he turned up at around 10am instead. Thankfully, I hadn’t chosen to go out for the morning. He had to keep phoning his “coach” for advice. He found the BT cables in the standard ‘service riser’ of my new-build block of flats, with the end of each cable labelled with the relevant plot number. But there was a problem. These cables still needed to be dragged through the handy underground duct provided, using the handy blue string that was already spooled into the duct, and then connected into the handy new BT-labelled manhole that sits in front of my property. So, this engineer made an appointment with what he called BT’s “UG guys” (i.e.: underground guys) to come out and take a look, “either today or tomorrow” he said. Then he left.

A few hours after he’d gone, I had a call from someone at customer services at BT. What my engineer had apparently done was to wrongly pass the job to the “big-job” BT engineers – the sort who apparently deal with digging up main roads, erecting strings of telephone poles, metal-detecting for lost cables and suchlike. These “big job” engineers were promptly cancelled by the BT customer-service rep.

So; I was then told I would get a phone call “soon”, which would tell me what would be done and when it might be done. One month after I had placed my home-move order, I was right back at the very start of the process again. No BT phone line, no most-expensive-version BT broadband, and no timetable for when these might be re-connected.

The BT area manager’s visit:

Then a BT area manager turned up unannounced on Thurs 13th; thankfully I happened to be home at the time, and had a phone call from the site sales staff to tell me he was here. He chided the BT cable “jointer” to get a move-on and to connect the cables in my block’s service riser. He also said that an extra section of BT underground cable now needed to be laid from Block 1 to Block 2. This had not been done already, apparently, due to inadequate and wrongly-labelled site plans that the developer had supplied to BT, although the problem had not been spotted by BT when they successfully connected phone services to the adjacent block 1.

Basically he said I should now wait until I got a dial-tone on my BT phone sockets, and then I would know that the job had been done. And that it could be up to two more weeks before this happened. Then I should phone BT customer services saying that BT engineering work had delayed the re-connection, and to ask for some compensation.

Being promised dates by which I would have a dial-tone:

So, I was now hoping I would have a dial-tone by 28th Sept — but of course this didn’t happen.

Then the date slipped again and slipped again. BT tried to tell me they were waiting for the developer to clear blocked ducts — but I spoke to the site manager, and he said they were all clear.

Eventually the required BT cabling work had been completed and checked by 9th October. The BT cables in the service riser were finally connected and the DP box was installed. The line was then apparently turned on at the exchange on 19th October – only for BT to find there was now an unidentified fault somewhere between me and the exchange. I still had no dial-tone.

Tracking down the BT cabling fault:

Another BT engineer was sent out, who apparently thought he was coming “to install the phone in the flat”, or so the calling-card he left said. Only… I’d spoken to the BT liaison person on the phone earlier that day, who’d said that no access to the property would be required in order to find the fault.

Eventually it transpired that home access would be required. Yet another engineer appointment was made, and a different engineer arrived the next day and checked everything and worked his way from the brand new fully-wired sockets in my flat, to the new DP box downstairs in the service riser, to the cabinet box out on the main road, and then up to the main Hanley exchange in the city-centre. Eventually he found that while the “computer work” had been done at the Hanley exchange had been done, the “wiring work” there had not. He fixed this at the exchange, and finally I actually had a dial tone on my home BT phone! That happened on Friday 12th October.

I wrote asking for compensation for all of the above… and was offered a mere £11. Which, apparently, is all that is “allowed” by BT’s rules. I still have to pay the £124.99 re-connection charge.