My parents are switching to full fibre on BT.
The outside digging work was fully completed on 13 February.
Some days after that my parents broadband developed a fault and the speed drop from around 32mbps to 4mbps if lucky. Someone had to come out and deal with the fault.
Eventually they said they couldn't fully fix it because my parents were moving over to full fibre. They managed to get it to 11mbps, which isn't really acceptable but as it wouldn't be that long I thought, no issue. I was wrong.
There had been various dates from BT and PlusNet regarding when the switch over would take place. PlusNet ones read as this is the date rather than this is the provisional date.
Since then someone from OpenReach rang up and asked my father for date.
A date of 21 February was agreed but I couldn't make that date and my father would like me present.
So I went online and changed the date to 18 March.
Then it dawned on my I could do 26 Feb. I remember the 22 not being available but I was sure the 26 was.
So I went back online, only to find I could not select any date in the past. I couldn't believe that within less than 1 hour, 20+ dates for the morning and afternoon had all suddenly been taking up.
So the BT customer contact centre was contacted. Very lovely woman on the phone who tried to help but initially one system wouldn't let her log on, so she had to try another.
Once she finally got in, her BT system was showing nothing before 18 March as available. She was able to go to the OpenReach system which did show some earlier dates being free but no 26 Feb. Now maybe that one had gone but I couldn't check because I couldn't go back in time.
In fact OpenReach still had the date as 21 Feb and her manager said that trumps anything BT have, so that date they have to go by.
So after 40 minutes nothing achieved. That isn't was fault of the lady on the phone but whoever designed your software and Web site. Perhaps someone can explain what the problem is with going back in time. It wasn't as if I was looking for a date before 21 Feb. I imagine the system would have let me select a date in December and not go back. Why anyone would do that of course is another matter.
Later on my father got a text message and e-mail from BT to say the date had changed to 18 March.
When I clicked on it, it took me to the tracking page. The date of OpenReach having visited the house was now gone. It was as if they have never turned up when in fact they had and in its place was a date of 7 March for them to visit the outside of the property. What do they need to do that given they have done that already?
And if they do need to come again, why were we not informed of this prior to be changing the date to 18 March. What are they going to do on this new date? Do OpenReach have lots of staff going to visit properties where no work needs to be done but the system tells them it does?
This order process started on 27 Dec and I was given the impression it wouldn't take this long to sort out. I was thinking by the end of January. However it will have been almost 3 months by the time they come to deal with it.
In this time my parents will have a month of poor quality Internet and now what they are paying PlusNet for.
So the whole thing is a big mess. I don't know for certain that they won't turn up on 21 Feb. More likely they will turn up on 7 March to do work that has already been done.
All of this is costing BT and OpenReach money but they can pass it back on to their customers. I work in IT and know that if you can keep people away from ringing up, you save money. Having customers do stuff digitally online is far better than people ringing you up.
Of course they can only do things online if the options exist.
One last point. When I first rang up there was an advert about BT and EE merging. This was interesting, given when I helped my parents set up the transfer from PlusNet to BT, the person on the phone wanted to put them onto EE but couldn't get EE to match a BT offer! So they had to sign them up to BT but even then couldn't match the BT online offer via the phone, so had to give a discount on the first bill, whenever that will be! Clearly this merger is rather complicated but given they want customers to use the EE brand, you'd think that would match the BT offers! The offer was free installation cost of £11.99. Only BT offered this online and not EE.
I only rang up because I was trying to get my parents a battery backup device, due to vulnerabilities and lack of mobile reception.
