I moved into a new house a month ago, its a new build property in Northern Ireland.

I phoned BT a week before we moved in and told them we were moving house, we changed all our details and organised for our phone and broadband to be installed at the new address.

Simple........

Um, no.

Upon moving into our new house we phoned BT again to get our service connected, they booked an engineer to visit us. A few days later my wife got a call on her mobile from a 'BT Surveyor' who had the wrong address on his file for us and wanted our actual address, my wife told him our proper address and that was that. Another day goes by and I get a similar call on my phone from exactly the same person who has exactly the same problem. I gave him our proper address AGAIN and he hangs up.

Another week passed and we have heard nothing from BT, I phone them and arrange another engineer to call at our address. I get the date of the 9th September. On the 9th september I call BT to find out when the engineer is calling 'The engineer cancelled the booking' they tell me. Brilliant. No reason was given for the cancellation, I re-booked the engineer again. 10 minutes later, yes, 10 minutes later, I call back and ask if my engineer is still booked, 'no' they tell me, 'the visit was cancelled 5 minutes ago by the engineering team'.

WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON BT!!!!!

I have been on the phone 10 times to BT, I have been on hold for around 2 hours in total and I have been given zero information what is going on.

I called today and booked ANOTHER engineer but doubt this will happen either, I keep getting promised a call from their engineering department to tell me why there has been such a delay but that never happens.

I am actually on hold to BT as I type this who have told me there is an engineer booked for the 13th october (I booked this visit at 10am this morning so I am doing better than the last few times) so we will see what happens, but I am not holding my breath.

All I want to know is what is going on and why has there been a hold up, I understand if ground work has to take place to connect our new estate to the existing BT wiring but PLEASE just tell me SOMETHING!!!!

The other annoying thing is that I cant go with any other service provider as our house is so new its postcode is not on any of their systems yet!!!! ahhhhhhhh!!

Thats my rant over, I know that the general Digital Spy reader wont be able to help my but have noticed that BT seem to keep their eye on this part of the forum (Hopefully they have heard me shouting).

Thanks.

Thats exactly the same situation we were in.We had no phone line or broadband for 3 months.The engineer told us that the address change scheme was 85% failure.
As an aside.Our Home hub died on Tuesday afternoon.We rang them at 3 pm and our new router was at my door at 8 am next morning.Can't get much faster than that.

I was lucky then.Spot on job and check. Wish you and others in the same position a quick solution.

I think you've just answered your own problem. You said that the house is so new that it won't be on any of the other systems yet. That may well include the engineers side of BT (Openreach I think). Same company, different department. Arse and elbow spring to mind with some of these large companies.

Nope, different company - as required by the regulator.

There are Chinese walls between Openreach and the rest of BT so as to ensure a more "level playing field" for other service providers.

I moved into a new build back in December and had a lovely conversation on my mobile with the openreach engineer.
He called early in the morning to ask for directions to this strange address, so I asked him the reg of the van he was in, he was puzzled but told me, I was then able to tell him to drive out of the openreach depot, turn left, go 100metres and stop.

My house is almost next door to the local openreach depot and he couldn't find it

As Homer would say......DO'H! You would have been aswell walking up to the depot and holding the guy's hand if he needed help that badly. Some people don't have a clue.

Just thought I would add a quick update to this saga.

About 2 weeks ago I noticed a BT van outside and an engineer was looking down inside one of the service boxes in the road, I went out to him and asked when I could hope to have a telephone line that worked and he told me that all the new wiring for the estate my house was in was supposed to be done MONTHS ago, he had no idea why it has not been done yet and would put a call in to get it done ASAP.

Fast forward to today.

FINALLY, I had a visit from a BT engineer who wired up my Master Socket and did a quick line test, the result of which showed that the main cable from the exchange had still not been fitted/connected, I of course knew this would be the case as a result of the encounter 2 weeks ago

The engineer was a nice bloke but could not tell me when this work was supposed to be carried out.

At the very least I have the internal wiring fitted so wont need to be at home for another engineer visit, all the work that needs to be done will take place outside, so there is a tiny chink of light at the end of the tunnel.

The joys of moving into a new build property eh!

Thats nearly 4 months and counting BT.

That's a long time to wait! It sounds as if the developer hadn't liaised with Openreach correctly; or Openreach only did half the job!

Surprised the estate builders had not been in contact with BT Openreach or Virgin Media to arrange this?.
Quite often it's a rare chance to get fibre installed to the home! I know someone who had fibre, but the adaptors Openreach used in the house were not compatable with broadband so he had to use dial up for a long time (on fibre to the home) before it was sorted!

Guess all the other new houses are in the same situation or did you manage to move in early?

Openreach should take orders for new lines in new homes from other phone companies as well as BT retail!

Yep!

The old system - where people had pride in doing the job - has now been demolished. Entirely replaced by know-nothing "managers".

How you can have "fair competition" - where there's only 1 set of landlines, and SOMEBODY has to maintain them, I've no idea.

There's ONE PSTN telephone network - in any country - and in the UK it's the BT one.

Anyway, the regulator "demanded" BT hand over the local loops ....... thus creating a huge bureaucracy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local-loop_unbundling

They already do, TT,Sky ,O2 Post Office and many more are all able to raise orders for new lines on existing and new build addresses, business and residential, if fact they have exactly the same access as BT (Retail)

Welcome to my world.

http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/forums/s....php?t=1364824

Same as Post Office. It's been taken over by "managers", paid loads and completely clueless ........

Where to begin.....

This morning I got a call from another BT engineer who was on his way to connect us to the exchange, I told him that the wiring from the road had still not been done and that he was wasting his time.

He told me that he would make some enquiries and see what the hold up was with the new cabling from the main road and call me back. About an hour later he did indeed phone me back and told me that the contractors had done half the job and then buggered off, this was 3 months ago, no sign of them finishing it anytime soon, said the engineer.

Great, how long am I going to wait for anything to happen this time I thought.

Enough was enough, I decided to go to the top, I emailed the CEO of BT.

30 minutes later my mobile rang, "Hello, is this Mr McCann?, this is Ian Livingston I am the CEO of BT"!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

OH MY GOD.

Well, Mr Livingston was the most polite person I have ever talked to, he listened to all my problems and said he would pass it to the highest department who would deal with it, he then asked if he could do anything else for me before saying good-bye.

Another hour passed and I had another call, this time from lynne Clarke, head of Executive Level Complaints who said she was now in-charge of my problem and would make sure it was dealt with ASAP. She said she was already in contact with Open-Reach and would be back to me before 5pm.

True to her word, she called me a 4.45pm and gave me the news I thought I would never hear.

Open-Reach Contractors will be on-site TOMORROW AT 8AM to complete the work they started! Then a BT Engineer will arrive first thing on Saturday morning and finish the connection to my house.

AMAZING, simply AMAZING, I am speechless at how the last few hours have panned out.

All being well the next time I type a message on this site I will be using my laptop on a nice Wireless Broadband connection!

Thank you BT, but really, it should never have gone this far.

Hi pilot25dmc

I have just seen your post and I am glad this has been picked up for you and my colleagues in the executive complaints team is dealing with this for you. If however you do need any further help or advice or would like me to look into this for you send me your account number and a link to your post to btcare@bt.com and I will gladly help.

Regards David

True to their word the BT cable laying team arrived on-site today at 8am. They finished laying the cable between the junction box on the main road and my house at about 1pm.

I am just waiting on the engineer who will connect one end of the cable to the junction box and the other end to my house and I am sorted. I was told that he will either be here tomorrow or Monday morning.

Still cant believe that I had to resort to emailing the CEO of BT to get this work completed.

It just shows how quickly things can be done when the big boss makes a few calls.

Its a shame we have to contact the CEO team just to get anywere with BT,

Well, BT have been true to their word again and an engineer was on-site this morning at 8.30am.

As of 20 minutes ago I have a working phone and after talking with BT directly it seems my Broadband will be activated today too.

Should be all working in the next few hours.

Pretty amazing couple of days, never thought it would happen this quickly to be honest. Got to give credit to the CEO of BT, he sure can get things moving.