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When I was buying my house last July with Connells they suggested that I go with HomeTelecom (HT) as my Internet Service Provider. My guard was down at the time because I had just gone through the horror of buying a house in England! I had not heard of HT before, but I decided to give them a chance. That was the worst mistake I made when buying my house because that decision still haunts me even today. I wish I had done a little bit more research about HT or just read the reviews!
I will try and be brief. I was moving into the house on 28th July. The HT sales person told me that my service would be activated on July 31st remotely. My router was scheduled to arrive on July 30th. It did not arrive until August 6th because when the delivery guy tried to deliver it on the agreed date I was at work and a neighbour told him that no one had lived in my property for months...because the house had been vacant for so long while it was on sale. So the guy took the router back. I was surprised that happened because the sales person from HT knew that I was a new owner of the house and that could have been communicated to the delivery guy. Maybe I'm asking for too much. After the first failed delivery attempt I spent a great deal of time chasing up both HT and the delivery company trying to get it redelivered. HT customer services were very unhelpful and rather hostile. They never replied to my emails and at one time I resorted to contacting them publicly on their Facebook page.
When my router finally arrived on 06th August I plugged it in in great excitement hoping to finally get on the web. As you would have guessed, the broadband never worked. Since I am a very technical person (I am computer programmer) my first move was to plug a house phone into my phone socket and there was no dial tone. That had to be the problem. I then spent many minutes on the phone to the HT technical services while an engineer was trying to help me fix the problem. At one time he asked me to get a screw driver and open up the phone socket. Twice we got cut off because my mobile phone signal was not great. On both occasions they never bothered to call me back.
On 15th August I had had enough. It was just the stress that I could not deal with anymore. I wrote them an email and asked them to cancel my account and refund my money because they had failed to provide the service which they promised in the time that they had promised. I requested all communications with me to be via emails from that day forward so that I have a trail of our correspondences. I also explained to them that the reason I took the contract was because they promised that the service would be live by 31st July or thereafter. However, they would not have it. They told me that if I cancel it would cost me £407. After much argument they gave me £40 off if I stayed or pay £265 to cancel. In my mind I feel that the service was activated on a dead line because there is no dial tone. However, for their evidence HT have sent me a call log of two test calls which the OpenReach engineer made from my number and got a dial tone to prove that the line was working. This is the bit that baffles me. Surely the absolute sure way to tell that the line is working is to test it from the phone socket inside my house with a phone. Then that would leave the engineer with do doubt that the phone line works. How exactly did OpenReach test it. Can someone please explain if I am missing something?
I personally feel that they should just take back their router and refund my money and let me go. However, it does not work like that; it's like they've got claws on me and they can't let go. I really hate what they have done because they have made my house move hell!
What are your thoughts...please don't tell me that I'm an idiot for going with them in the first place because I know that already
Thanks for your time.
