to be disgusted by BT

[herecomesthsun]

My husband is keen not to have direct debits. We have stick with BT rather than changing to another provider, and have had frequent nuisance phone calls pleading with us to tie into this package or that package.

But the deal breaker is their payment system. They sent the bill on 9th March. It arrived n 19th March. I was ill over the weekend and have just opened it. Apparently, we had to pay by 19th March or get a late charge. How shoddy. I am now looking for a new provider...

We left BT and took the financial hit because we were so pissed off when they wouldn't let us defer our Broadband provision - we had to move house, moved in with parents, and had to pay for 8 months of broadband without actually getting it.

I can't bear BT. Am with them out of laziness.

Who are the better providers?

Oblomov - exactly the same here. Cuts off dozens of times a day. Nothing ever done about it. No matter how often I ring.

They just have an old overloaded exchange were we are and with ever more new broadband customers we now get cut off at busy times of day.

I have a new found dislike of BT. I wanted to stay with them because then we'd be in the phone book, but with FB anyone who wants to find me can.

So who is better than BT? I think DH is about to go with Orange.

I do not like BT. I am not going into details on the very many reasons.

So who is better than BT? After a decade with BT, with have been with SKY for 3 years and have had 1 fault (which happened to be because of BT!) which was fixed within 5 days.

This is considerably better than BT but BT were so bad, I doubt any other provider could be worse.

Argh, I was all relaxed and now I'm fuming again at the mention of BT.

I hate them. I really, really hate them.

My husband and I simply could not believe their appalling service. Everything they could possibly get wrong, they got wrong. And then tried to charge us for it.

This happened both times we moved house - both times we were without the phone and internet for weeks. A friend of ours has experienced exactly the same problem.

We have now paid a lump sum to extricate ourselves from our contract with them. We are also going to inform Oftel of our experience (the list of errors/grievances is about two pages long!) and are going to copy in Watchdog as well.

Do other people have reasonable experiences of Sky?

I'd like to swap but don't want a frying pan/fire experience.

We are having a new phone line put in - no option but for BT to do it. I am dreading it.

When they arrange an appointment for an engineer to come round its done by an automated message. They give you a long reference to right down so you have to be able to grab a pen. Then they ask you to confirm in seconds if the appointment is convienient for you (oh yeah and then you get charged if there is no one in when they come round). So how do you explain you need to do the school run then?

You can have a monthly bill that just charges for usage only (rather than the power company style giving them extra cash to keep budgeting). You have to ask them for whole billing and tell them you want it on a monthly basis.
One customer service rep claimed this didn't exist - I pointed out we'd had it at the old place before we moved so yes it jolly well did thank you.