PJCNET

BT have 2 paid services for BT Broadband customers:

BT Home IT Support: This is supposed to be PC technical support, but I have reason to believe that BT refer people to this service who have broadband problems caused by BT. They charge £24.47 per call to their support team or £8.80 per month plus a minimum of £88.09 for an engineer to visit at the time of writing.

Broadband Accelerator Service: Firstly they apparently run tests to see if the customer can benefit this service. They then send an engineer out to adjust the customer’s PC settings and local wiring to attempt to speed up broadband. They guarantee your speed is improved by at least 0.5Mb/S after the visit or your money back, the problem is it’s BT who decide if you are getting a faster speed by their line test, but I’m sceptical if this is accurate based on my personal experience. They apparently charge £90 for this service and charge extra if the engineer attends longer than 1 hour.

My Personal Opinion

The big problem is that the standard technical support service from BT broadband is totally and utterly abysmal based on my personal experiences as an ex PC technical support technician for almost 13 years. The BT technicians are based in India or whereabouts and often speak very poor English making them very hard to understand, especially when they are trying to talk you through something. Most technicians technical expertise is very poor and problems are mainly resolved using a standard flow chart that isn’t always relevant to the actual problem, for instance when I reported slow speeds only at peak times, the technician told me to change the wireless channel on the router even though I wasn’t even using wireless and kept telling him this to no avail. Obviously changing this had absolutely no effect what-so-ever, but he wouldn’t listen and kept going on saying this will sort out my broadband speed repeatedly because it said this on his flow chart. Unfortunately this kind of experience using standard BT broadband techical support is very common.

What’s unforgivable is BT seem to use the poor standard service to get people to pay extra for services when they should be providing a good service anyway. It’s okay to charge for home PC technical support if it really is required and the problem isn’t caused by BT in the first place. In my example, I have called BT repeatedly with slow broadband speeds at peak times only, my friend and neighbour is with another provider. Tiscali have told my friend that The local BT Exchange is overloaded and causing the slow speed problem throughout the area on all ISPs, yet BT have denied this to me when I know this has been the real problem for 4 months. BT then told me that I have to pay £24.47 just to speak to BT Home IT Support on 1 occasion. BT are literally the cause of problems in this case by not maintaining the local exchange with demand and then they are making lots of extra money by scamming people into using their paid service that can’t possibly help when the problem isn’t even at the person’s home – it’s the BT exchange. Instead of trying to charge for a service that can’t help in this case they should be resolving the problem at the BT Exchange and in fact even paying compensation for the inconvenience they have caused.

I know a lot about computers and I know exactly what BT are up to, but many people aren’t technically minded on PCs like myself and will fall for BT’s rubbish and end up out of pocket by paying for one of these 2 services when it cannot possibly help. I have also noticed that BT standard support is far worse since introducing these paid services, I wonder if this is on purpose to make even more money? If so, it’s very VERY unfair, even if it’s not on purpose it’s total incompetence and it’s extremely wrong.

So when BT provide a slow broadband service due to overloading the exchange, they clearly make lots of extra money from fobbing people off onto these paid services that can’t help. This is absolutely abysmal the way they are treating loyal BT customers like myself. I have been complaining since October 2008 about slow speeds at peak times, see Is BT Broadband getting overloaded? along with comments.

Disclaimer

The above document details my own personal opinion only and it cannot be disclosed as definite fact. Although PJCNET always tries to make the information available as accurate as possible, we cannot be held responsible for any mistakes made or any adverse publicity this my cause. We invite BT to respond to my opinion to give both sides of the debate.

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