Oh God! Another Intermittent Fault

I have had a really good broadband service from BE Unlimited for a couple of years now. It’s been fast, reliable and consistent with no capping or slow downs or anything annoying like that. To top everything off the customer service is great. If you’re looking for a new provider I really couldn’t recommend them higher. Since I moved house however I have had a problem.

About a week after moving in we noticed that our internet connection would occasionally drop out, usually for a few minutes, sometimes for 10 or more. This tends to happen about three or four times a day.

BE were, as I expected, fantastic at helping me with this problem, they remotely checked connectivity, suggested swapping out elements, disconnecting phones etc. to no avail. Eventually, after doing various line tests we determined that there is intermittent noise on the phone line. Yavon, the ever helpful BE operator advised me to contact BT.

I picked up the phone and dialled 150 and explained the situation and that the engineer would need to come out and look at the problem (BT had sent someone round only two or three weeks prior to connect me). To my utter amazement I was then advised that if the engineer can’t find anything immediately wrong that they will then charge me over £100 for the privilege. Now, excuse me, but in my line of work you don’t charge for incompetence and if you provide a faulty service then you fix it. I explained, calmly to the BT rep that I as paying them to connect me and that they had obviously not done the job correctly. I was informed again that, should I be willing to pay for an engineer, that this would not be a problem. At this point the smoke began to pour from my ears.

I cannot fault the unfortunate woman who spoke to me from BT, she was very straight and advised me plainly that, as the fault is intermittent, it is highly unlikely that the engineer will find a problem and that it could cost me a lot of money. She then advised me to wait until the problem got worse!!

The incredulity of this situation was convincing me that I was actually in some kind of weird nightmare state; but no, BT is such a monopoly that it can actually operate in such a way. And the alternative would be Virgin. What can you do? I may hate watchdog, but I wonder what Mrs. Robinson would make of this one...