Dear BT
TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN
Dear Sir or Madam,
I write to officially complain about the speed of our Broadband and the quality of our telephone line. Grab a cup of tea.
Having lived in the same property for 10 years now, we have duly paid for your communication services; phone, broadband and TV, month in and month out. When we have had issues in the past, after going through the lengthy and arduous fault checking process with your call centre, an appointment is booked and a friendly engineer duly appears and has promptly fixed any problem. Great service by your engineering team by the way. No complaint there.
We live rurally which means we do not have Fibre Optic broadband so our not-so-trusty ADSL phone line is used to transmit data. We were apparently getting hooked up to Fibre Optic in 2017 but now that seems unlikely after I chased up the end of January. Fibre Optic has been installed to our ‘box’ but we are too far away to be connected. Seriously? We would love a definitive answer on when we will be getting Fibre Optic broadband as I have been telling myself for 3 years, 2017 was finally our year.
Our broadband speed has not really been an issue as the speed of the service over the past 10 years has been ‘okay.’ I say ‘okay’, the amount of drop outs on a daily basis is ridiculous. I personally like to practice mindfulness breathing when things get too bad, just to keep myself calm. When I work away from home and hook up to a WiFi network at clients, friends or at a service station, it reminds me how patient we and our sons, quickly approaching their teens by the way, have become. It used to be 10 seconds to load a page here, 30 seconds to a minute to load a page there. Since the bad weather in December 2016, it’s become 45 seconds here, 2 minutes there. THAT IS FOR ONE INTERNET PAGE TO LOAD UP ON OUR NETWORKED PC. Our children can only play one tablet at a time … do you know how hard that is to manage?! We have to choose to stream one thing on one bit of tech at a time, if we are lucky. I also have to turn all our WiFi enabled tech off daily and close all unnecessary applications, just to do my work.
Today was the final straw. You see I have an app, I’m pretty tech savvy. It’s called Jaunty Twig. Go look it up, it’s pretty awesome if I don’t say so myself. Anyway, as the 70MB data download was showing as 43 minutes my end, and my client needed the image files urgently, I gave him access to my back end CMS. Do you know who long it took his end to download the folder? Let’s play a game.
Was the answer:
- A – 3 seconds
- B – 1 minute
- C – 5 minutes
What was your answer? The answer was in fact, A – 3 seconds. Can you hear my brain boiling? 43 minutes to do a 3 second job (Infinity broadband or not) is not acceptable.
I am also a professional photographer. When I upload images to a client album, it can take up to 10 hours. Yes 10 hours. I understand our data upload averages around 75GB of data a month. The internet is my friend and you are putting a strain on our relationship.
Admittedly we do have an outstanding fault currently being investigated. I called up again last week as our phone line has been repossessed by the crackling witch. She appears every now and then. We try to ignore her but people that call our house find her quite noisy. Having to ask people to call our mobiles as we couldn’t even hear each other via our land line wasn’t right. Friendly engineer came on Monday and guess what? The witch was taking a nap and he couldn’t find the fault. I then embarrassed myself by checking the phone line myself several times in front of him, flabbergasted the witch was nowhere to be heard. Obviously devastated, I then mentioned our appalling internet service. He duly checked and said we had a speed on 0.2 Mbps …. I could hardly contain my excitement. 0.2 Mbps?!!!!!!!!!!!! I will chat about that in a moment. The engineer suggested I call you again and ask for my line ‘to be reset’. I duly did this and guess what, the chap on the end of the phone replied there was indeed a fault on the line and would open the job again (as the engineer had signed off).
It’s now Friday. Two things to note. Firstly, the witch is back. I have a recording of her you could listen to or you could just call our home number 01273834610 to check the crackling. Secondly, there has been no further contact from you. This again is unacceptable. Would you kindly provide me with an update asap?
You graciously regularly offer me by way of TV and online marketing adverts an online Infinity deal of Super Fast Broadband with speeds of up to 300 Mbps. That means we are absolutely living in the dark ages and we are being charged the same amount as someone who could get up to 3.5 Mbps by way of normal broadband. We don’t. We are being charged full price for a service that barely touches the side of the cable. This is not okay and we formally request this issue is investigated and resolved asap. We also wish to request compensation or an adjustment on our monthly payments for the total and utter poor service you have provided us.
Finally, just to make you aware, I am currently in the throws of setting up a 4G WiFi contract with my mobile telephone provider Vodafone to test 3G/4G data streaming. If this is successful, we will no doubt, be cancelling our entire contract with you. We are out of contract and have no immediate desire to sign up again unless you can resolve this ongoing issue. It is also worth noting that our lovely rural neighbours are all in the same dire broadband situation as us and have asked to be kept in the loop regarding our data streaming test with Vodafone.
I look forward to hearing from you.
Lesley Taylor