Amazing BT Engineers

Having great fun with my parents broadband at the moment (posting here because it is BT phone that we called out rather than the PlusNet broadband).

Had noise on the line so called out BT for the phone. The setup in the house is that have a NTE5 faceplate filter connected at the main socket, router plugged in there and then the Internet is shared around the house using powerline networking.

The guy went out and looked at it and said that it was all wrong because with the NTE5 faceplate filter it wouldn't be possible to get Internet upstairs and that he couldn't understand how it was working. So, he went ahead and removed the faceplate filter (which was mine) and replaced it with a normal faceplate. He then went on to inform them they would have to buy new filters to be able to connect everything back up again. He's left them with no broadband and nicked the filter that was perfectly good.

I have put in a complaint to BT about this because the guy has taken a perfect setup and left them with something that is not working. Now I have to go around there tonight to fix their Internet connection.

To top it all he has blamed the noise on this and therefore they are going to be charged £130 for the callout.

Not expecting anyone here to "fix" this but wanted to vent as this is ridiculous and BT phone engineers shouldn't touch broadband or take my NTE filter when there is nothing wrong with it.

Incompetence at its height.

PS. If I get no joy with complaints then I will be writing to the CEO (can anyone remind me what his email address is off the top of their heads?).

[email protected] should do it.

http://www.ceoemail.com/

That has to get an A* for incompetence.

He has also removed your property, as you say. Was it a BT faceplate or a third-party one?

To be fair it was a BT faceplate but it was the one provided on my phone line about 10 years ago when I had an engineer install of broadband. I just can't believe he took it off incorrectly and then took it away with him.

I was inceredulous to say the least - and am not sure what he has left it with as their router no longer connects to the Internet, will find out tonight what exactly the state is now but clearly it is not working.

And thanks to others for the email addresses. I suspect they will come in handy in the coming weeks as I am not convinced that I will get much info from the complaint I have raised. Just wish phone engineers would leave well alone if they aren't broadband trained (and if he was trained then their training needs a good review).

This really has nothing to do with BT Broadband

OK, point me at the BT Openreach forum!

I know but plusnet would have been the wrong place to post it as well. So, I plumped for a forum.

http://www.openreach.co.uk/orpg/home/submitFeedback....

Thanks.

As a quick update I have received a response to the complaint and they were apologetic but the fix they suggested was to send a broadband engineer even though I have sorted the mess left already. But, at least they have taken it seriously - really my goal is that they stop telephone engineers messing with home networks when they aren't trained for it.

So is the phone noise gone, and is there to be no charge?

The noise is gone and I will be paying the £130 as it was traced to the filter upstairs (looks like I dropped the ball on that one and will admit that somehow I missed ruling that out, I had the test socket out so often testing various things that I thought I had tested all of it but hadn't). Slightly ironically the filter that was faulty was a BT filter.

The complaint is about the removal of the faceplate and the total lack of knowledge the engineer had of the broadband. So, from the phone perspective he was fine he just shouldn't have gone near the faceplate itself as he didn't know what he was doing with that and didn't understand how home networks and ADSL operate.

In reply to a post by ian72:

The noise is gone and I will be paying the £130 as it was traced to the filter upstairs (looks like I dropped the ball on that one and will admit that somehow I missed ruling that out, I had the test socket out so often testing various things that I thought I had tested all of it but hadn't). Slightly ironically the filter that was faulty was a BT filter.

The complaint is about the removal of the faceplate and the total lack of knowledge the engineer had of the broadband. So, from the phone perspective he was fine he just shouldn't have gone near the faceplate itself as he didn't know what he was doing with that and didn't understand how home networks and ADSL operate.

Bit of a case of the blind leading the blind I suppose, and I cannot really understand why he/she removed the faceplate, but glad you got there in the end.

The wholesale implementation or general chatter forums would have been quite a bit closer to the mark.

Edited by orly (Tue 31-Jan-12 22:21:59)

why did you have a filter upstairs, when you had a filtered faceplate?

Because it was the BT filtered faceplate with the extension connected to the terminals on the back - those I believe are unfiltered if I remember rightly?

the original bt filtered faceplate filtered the terminals 2/5 on the back,
the clone ones made a/b available on the back of the socket for adsl extentions as well.

Ah, OK thanks. Although double filtering shouldn't have added issues. They still have problems though so will be looking again at the weekend.