B-bloody-T - please help. Who can I complain to?

[JoshandJamie]

I run a small business from home. I have recently taken on 3 new clients and have a ton of work to do. But on Friday, my BT broadband decided to stop working. (Some history: we moved house in Aug and it took BT ONE MONTH to sort our broadband out despite endless calls).

Anyway, we called on Friday and were told (after 40 mins) that it was an exchange problem that would be fixed at 9.30 that night.

Well surprise surprise on Saturday it still wasn't working. We called again. This time we were told that they can't test our line because their testing equipment was down but that someone would call me at 8pm that night. No call.

So I called again today. Spent over an hour on the phone with them troubleshooting - which resulted in a complete reinstallation of the software etc. Still nothing. Phoned back and was told that a fault had been registered but the department that could help is only open during the week and that someone would call me (ha bloody ha).

I now have a number to call first thing tomorrow morning. But I've had it with them. Seriously it took me a month to get it working in the first place and involved me having to pay for an engineer to come out and having to pay for broadband I wasn't receiving. And now it's happening all over again.

I simply can't run a business without broadband and this week in particular I have so much to do that I feel like crying.

I am sick of getting put through to call centres in India where the people on the phone can barely speak english and will only follow a script regardless of what you tell them.

This is BT for goodness sake. Surely they have to be more competent than this. I really want to complain to someone about this as their incompetence is costing me business, but I don't know who to complain to.

And it's not even any good trying to change service provider because it takes 7 days for BT to shut down their service and another 7 days for a new provider to set it up. And given it's still all run on BT infrastructure, it probably still won't work. I can't go for 2 weeks without broadband.

Please help someone. thanks

PS - if I don't respond, it's because i'm having to come online using AOL dial up which is so slow it's hardly worth using.

BT are dreadful. Sorry. I spent years working in I.T. and every time BT were involved it meant weeks of **ck ups, letters, phone calls, and hours and hours of work. They are so big that it doesn't matter. There is no one you can complain to that will have any effect. You will just have to wait.

You have MUCH sympathy, they are truly, truly awful.