As correctly observed elsewhere, all other providers except Virgin use the same outside equipment which would therefore be subject to the same fallibility, and to the vagaries of Openreach who are ultimately always going to be responsible for repairing and maintaining that equipment regardless of which provider you pay your bills to. Based on my own experience, yes, BT Customer Service is, by and large, shocking; but it's entirely hit-and-miss whether you'll achieve any better elsewhere, not least precisely because it all comes back to Openreach in the end. At one time, changing providers represented somewhat ( although even then, only somewhat ) of a threat to any given provider; nowadays, if you threaten to change provider, they're basically laughing up their sleeves at you because they know you may well end up as bad or worse off. This, of course, is to say nothing of the fact that one of the two most prevalent causes of complaint on this forum is the porting of numbers between providers; if that's part of your equation, I would definitely think twice before jumping ship, as dire as BT Customer Service is.
Two things, I think, bear thinking about. Firstly, if Openreach ( as opposed to BT or any other single provider ) were held accountable, by anyone, for anything, ever, it might all be a very different story. However, for all practical intents and purposes, and for whatever reason, Openreach are effectively invulnerable.
Secondly: to give credit where due, the moderators on here are, for the most part, helpful in these matters, and can sometimes succeed in resolving issues where the standard BT Customer Service channel has failed ( sometimes, as in your case, spectacularly ). ( Due attention being paid to the words 'for the most part' and 'sometimes' ). I myself have benefitted from such intervention on one occasion. However, what does it say about a multi-million-pound company such as BT ( a ) that their normal Customer Service channels are so bad that it falls to the moderators on a public forum - which not everyone even knows exists - to step in to resolve an issue; and ( b ) that despite the fact that this has been the case for a very long time now, still the Customer Service complaints come pouring in and still the level of that service doesn't improve?
"Is anyone else experiencing truly shocking customer care from BT"? Spend some time thumbing through this forum, and then as our American cousins have it, you do the math.
