In June, I signed a contract for broadband with BT. An Openreach surveyor told me the installation was complex and would require another visit. Five months passed with no progress. When I rang BT for an update in November, I was told Openreach would charge between £1,500 and £3,000 for the work. It turns out it had known about this for a month and I was given four days to decide whether to pay. If I don’t, my BT contract will be cancelled. I don’t even get the exact cost until I’ve given my decision. As all the other providers in my area rely on Openreach, I’m stuck.
CP, Croxdale
BT’s insistence you will be left without an internet connection unless you pay a sum it won’t specify until you have agreed to it is outrageous. Since you wrote in, the deadline expired and your contract was cancelled. However, why you were being charged was a mystery. The government’s universal service obligation requires BT to foot the bill if the cost of connecting a property is less than £3,400. If it’s more, customers have to pay the difference. These unfortunates tend to live in remote rural areas. You live in a terrace house three miles from Durham and others in your village have an internet connection. It should not be a costly business to extend the service to your door.
I asked BT how the charge was calculated, what work was involved and why the cost was a secret. BT replied after a purported “investigation”. It apologised for the delay in informing you of the, still unspecified, fee, but maintained you needed to accept it for your order to proceed. It too claimed that yours was a “complex” connection and that had taken time (five months!) to work out what was needed. Again, I asked it to explain the charge and the required works. BT said, again, it would investigate.
This is where things took an odd turn. Instead of BT, Openreach, its sister company, got back. It declared that BT’s response was redundant, and so were my questions, because it had just realised it had boobed.
“We made a mistake and we’re very sorry,” it said. “Having conducted a thorough analysis, the customer shouldn’t have been quoted for excess construction charges. We didn’t identify that the property had a previous existing service.”
So much for a “complex” connection that took five months to determine. And so much for BT’s initial “investigation” in response to my questions.
Where does its sudden enlightenment leave you? Nowhere, so far. The wheels grind on as BT works out how, and when, it can get you up and running. Providers are required by regulator Ofcom to pay customers £5.83 for each day of delay to the start of a new service. The payments should be made automatically once you are online, as I’ve reminded BT.
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