BT blames customers for faults and fines them £130

BT customers are being forced to pay a £130 charge when their phone line stops working through no fault of their own.

Money Mail readers have told how they have been charged a set fee for an engineer�s visit, even when Britain�s biggest phone company is to blame for the problem.

BT should levy the fee only if the customer is to blame.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/money/bills/article-21278...

In reply to a post by Anonymous:

BT customers are being forced to pay a £130 charge when their phone line stops working through no fault of their own.

Money Mail readers have told how they have been charged a set fee for an engineer�s visit, even when Britain�s biggest phone company is to blame for the problem.

BT should levy the fee only if the customer is to blame.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/money/bills/article-21278...

I've had to arrange a broadband engineer to come round and fix the broadband on several occasions but the call centre in India repeatedly kept sending line engineers who aren't equipped to fix broadband issues. This resulted in me being charged on the bill but I rang up BT who were aware of this communication problem and refunded me straight away.

This is probably an isolated issue that the daily fail has blown completely out of proportion...again.

Edited by deleted (Wed 11-Apr-12 11:05:49)

Well known in broadband circles, i.e. you should test from the test socket, and unless you have damaged the outdoor cabling with a strimmer (Daily Mail example) then you should not have to pay anything.

All detailed in the telephone directory.

What is NOT expanded on is that the engineers work for Openreach, and file a job report, and then the backoffice systems raise the charge according to the codes in the report. These are passed to the phone line rental provider, which is at liberty to appeal these if they think they are unfair. BT Retail seems to pass them on without question, relying on the home owner to do so.

System is like it is because of the seperation of units within the BT Group.

Yet another creeping rip-off that this country is getting to be so good at. There's an interesting post about this on the TalkTalk forum - one man's experience of OpenReach charges. http://talktalkmembers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=7...

In this case TalkTalk appear to be shirking any responsibility as the retailer.

This is not new, but interestingly it seems more common with some providers than offers, and not just because of the providers size. i.e. some do better at handling faults and the communication processes.

The creation of Openreach was bound to lead to a desire to charge for everything, and is normal for this sort of enforced thing, as the accountants require every action to have a profit margin.

There might be a few where an incorrect charge is raised but in a lot of cases where people appeal it is later proven that it was not BT responsibility and the customer should pay.

I would guess that there are significantly more cases where BT has not charged when it could have compared with incorrect charging but those are never published.

Do the technician have targets to charge for X repairs per week - NO.

lol, snip from the DailyFail article:

"The fault, which started after heavy rainfall, was eventually found to be in the phone exchange."

riiiiigght - it rains inside the telephone exchange...

In reply to a post by FRS_Plunderer:

riiiiigght - it rains inside the telephone exchange...

I know a guy who only managed 512kbps on ADSL until he moved to AAISP who managed to persuade BT to properly investigate. They found a hole in the exchange roof, letting the rain in onto his line card. Something BT retail (previous ISP) never did determine.

Now his connection achieves around 7mbps.

Sounds tres odd.

The DSL line card, as in the DSLAM is in a 19" rack, and the card is shared with 47 other lines, and is a cm from other cards too. So a leak onto the DSLAM is likely to render it inoperable, rather than limit speed.

lol sounds like the kind of fud customers get told when they ask the engineer "what was the problem then", round here they either say it was a cracked dilithium crystal or faulty flux capacitor...