hi

Just a quick question.

I have a friend who has moved in to a council flat but there was no phone line Active. so he rang BT and they say to reconnect him it will cost £150. I was just woundering if there are any other companys he can get connected with as £150 is alot and without a phone line he cant get sky or a internet connection.

I think Sky are subsidising the line installation at the moment if you take TV, Broadband and Talk. Might be worth telling your friend to give them a ring and see what they say.

There are other companies out there who do cheaper installs. Google is your friend.

I have looked on google and cant seem to find anything. ( might just be me being thick again)

Try BT again - £29.99 installation instead of £124.99 (it's never been £150).

http://www.serviceview.bt.com/list/p...Impl268785.htm

Well I was told that £29.99 was the new reconnection fee.

Virgin Media are the only company to use telephone lines of there own direct to consumers.

Installations vary as sometimes they install them from £10 up to a maximum of £50.

www.virginmedia.com or 0500-500-500

If you can avoid BT, then I recommend that you do so at all cost.
I have been having intermittent bouts of quite severe crackling noises on the phone line and intermittent connection problems with my PC.
I phoned BT faults, the noise was present at the time and the lady acknowledged the fact. She gave me a standard warning that "if it proved to be my equipment at fault" I would be liable to a charge of £99. At the time of reporting the fault I had disconnected all ancillary equipment and had a different phone connected so I was quite confident that my equipment was not at fault - and told her so.
To cut a long story short, the engineer came out, the fault was not present at that time, he did nothing, BT added £99 to my bill.
No-one at BT was willing to discuss the problem on the phone, putting me through to their "boiler room " in India who were no help at all and damned difficult to communicate with.
A so called "independent mediation authority" was clearly nothing of the sort. The person I spoke to was clearly a BT employee, quite ill mannered and very supportive of her colleagues .
I finally wrote to BTs correspondence centre in Durham and finally had a reply in the form of a generic computer produced letter which was very jolly and frivolous in style, saying that they were pleased to credit my bill with £99 and were pleased that I had chosen to use BT. The phone problem still persists.
The phrase "cowboys & indians" comes to mind.

The same thing is happening with me now. I should be expecting an engineer call out charge on my bill. It taken me a while to get my line sorted, just under 6 months.

I am getting call disconnections while making and receiving calls. I've had four up till now. Two of them were before the engineer came. I've also had poor telephone conversations with BT, it has not mattered whether or not the representative is based in the UK, it has been hard to hear the person talking even with the phone on loudspeaker.
I've tried three phones on my line, two are BT branded, one of those is a home hub phone and the other phone I got was a corded cheap Binatone phone to try. To me, all three were equal in volume and conversations were the same on each phone yet the engineer blamed my phone so now I have to pay. The engineer said I should buy a better phone. I already have a BT Verve 450 that cost me £50 so there is no way of my paying out for another phone, not when I will be charged for the call out. As far as I'm concerned, I've tried three phones, two cordless and BT branded ones, and a cheap corded one. There should be a difference between the cheap one and the more expensive one and that is what the engineer was saying. He refused to compare the cheap one against the cordless.

I really don't think anyone buys three phones, all of them sounding the same as the other and it be each phone with the problem.

Yes a similar thing happened last year at my mother-in-law's house. She had terrible intermittent cracking on the line. As soon as I reported the fault, the person at the other end was very keen to threaten me with a £99 charge if they couldn't find the fault.
It was a very straightforward setup but the engineer couldn't find the cause of the fault. However he felt that he needed to make up a story (for BT's benefit) in order to avoid us having a charge imposed.
Finally I found the loose wire myself and stood in the back doorway, phone in hand shaking the wire whilst talking to BT's fault line. She threatened me again, but the engineer actually fixed it on his second visit.

Well unless you can get a service from a cable supplier in your area the line coming into your house will be the same openreach pair of wires whatever company you go for.

i had exactly the same problems with pipex and was charged £85 etc, i finally got an independant ex-BT engineer out who said it was a common problem and is damp on the line, BT came out and actually heard the crackle, they'd been 4 times previously and not heard it, they then got the underground chaps out and fixed the problem. i still have an odd crackle so i presume they only did half a job instead of replacing the line totally. I havent confronted pipex yet nut i'm going to ask for my £85 + independant engineers fee + compensation, fingers crossed i might get something but i'm definately switching from pipex.

They didn't threaten you, they informed you.

I cancelled my BT line in Jan of this year. The quality of the line was constantly getting worse voice calls were noisy and my broadband would not work properly.As I am a long way from the exchange they weren't really interested in my case. Once when I was having BB problems they sent an engineer out (but they gave him a fancy name so they could charge more) and said they couldn't find any fault on their line even though my equipment was all working fine and then my BB ISP said I'd have to pay £180 as they had been charged by Openeach.
At the end of the day I didn't have to pay it fortunately but I realized what money grabbing morons this telecommunications company had become and I had to get away.
And of course BT pass the buck to Openreach and Openreach pass the buck to BT and everyone says well we have to charge because Openreach are charging us.

The engineers are usually OK but the rest of BT and Openreach management leave a lot to be desired.
I think lots of customers are getting rid of their landline and using mobiles and mobile BB or going with cable if their is service in their area.

It seems to me BT and Openreach are trying to claw back this revenue elsewhere.

I'd rather not go back to BT if I can help it. Not easy because I am out in the sticks so don't have much choice.

If only I had Wi-Max for my BB from a base station I'd be happy or if the mobile BB services had better coverage in the rural areas.

I just hope the competition keeps eating away at BT's customer base.

I beg to differ. This was a case of a very elderly lady with health problems who was dependant on an emergency link provided by the council for her to summon aid in the event of a medical emergency. The phone line was essential as a matter of life and death and BT knew it. However rather than making efforts to restore the line, all they could think of was threateniing, yes threatening an old lady with a charge of £100. All this when the fault was a very obvious one. I had to find it myself and demonstrate it to the engineer before he could bring himself to fix it.
Disgusting people !

every fault that appears on our laptop's regardless of where the fault is has "CAPC" cust advised of posible charges. they are working from a script and have to say it on every job.
with regards to the lifeline, our controls comb through the work over the next day or 2 and look at the notes on the job, if the notes are there they tend to "un-officially"(as it would be seen as un-equivelent) prioritise the faults if the line is for an elderly person/ lifeline.

How would they have threatened you? Did they say "or else" at the end? Or "You will pay up"? As openreachpeep said, they work from a script and would have informed you that there may be a charge. Just because they didn't fall over themselves to rush around immediately and say "and of course we will do it all for free" you deemed this a threat.

openreachpeep
Forum Member

Join Date: Jun 2007
Location: manchester
Services: sky & sky bb
Posts: 666


Look how many posts he did then...is he the devil in disguise?

I have been having probs with my BT line this week and I knew what the fault was and the kind lady said they would get an engineer out to me but if the fault was in the house then they would charge me £150 ...i was outraged and said I would not have them out and I would try to fix the problem myself.....I have now all but sorted the problem and have elliminated it but the kind peeps from BT have tagged my phone line until the 16th September and now I can only reach BB speeds of 720kbps where in fact i had been getting 6500kbps....

I just dont know how these people can live with themselves wanting to charge this monies....It should be the matter of the engineer checking everything up to the house and then advising us if they were to come into the house then they will have to charge but oh no ...they come into the house anyway and then there is the charge...so basically they are doing a job that you did not really want them to do in the first place....it is bully boy tactics really!
Rant over

The line provider's responsibility for the line ends at the master socket - which, of course, is always in the house.

If that first socket is the problem, they will fix it free of charge but, if the problem is caused by anything beyond that first socket (e.g. an extension or any equipment connected within the house) the job become chargeable.

when people ring up to report a fault they are asked to check in the test socket, sometimes if they are not clued up they are told to unplug everything for about 10mins whilst the front-office tests the line. it has been said numourous times that if the line is still faulty when connected to the test socket then you will not need to worry about charges(unless of course you are responsible for any damage caused to the socket or cabling on the wall). if the EU has an old LJU(no test socket) their CP can req's that we come out and fault it, fit an nte5 and if the fault is proved beyond the LJU, not to do any work leave it disconnected and then go(without charge). it is then down to the eu to either fix their wiring or req's that we come out and fix it(chargeable).
we can only work on EU's wiring beyond the nte5 if it has been authorised by the CP(usually says "work beyond nte authorised" in our job notes), purely because we don't charge you the EU anymore, so if it says not authorised and you ask me to fix the faulty ext'n i can't.

with regards to the speed issue, they wouldn't reduce your speed as a result of you wanting to report a fault but not prepared to pay anyone to repair it. it will either be that the fault is still present, the BRAS hasn't caught back upto your line rate now that you have fixed the fault, or you have breached the FUP and are being throttled as a result.

p.s have now filed the horns down.

Question. Is there a post giving an idiots guide on what to do before you ring and get an engineer out. Except in areas with cable or Kingston -u -hull it is an Openreach engineer who will come out. As they only get something like £9.50 per year per connected line as revenue, you can be sure they will go after any extra source they can.

BT's creaky and crackly old landline quality should improve with mooted moves to roll out fiber to the cabinet. Don't hold your breath though!

In the mean time wireless solutions are the only viable alternative unless you have a cable provider with their own dedicated network.

As other poster have pointed out BT are dreadful when it comes to fixing noisey lines.

Yes, see openreachpeep's post above. Using the test socket will eliminate your internal wiring and if you don't have one then Openreach will fit one, leaving any internal faults for you to fit.

There are umpteen threads here on how your extensions should be wired to your Master Socket.

That doesn't stop water getting in underground for lines like which mine was which come from the BT cabinet underground and can get water in them.

We had a crackling line with BT, they quickly came out and fixed it, it did about 6 months later come back, however they were again quick to come out and fix it, this time doing a little more work and it was fine for the rest of the time we were a BT customer.

Writing as a onetime BT Retail 151 advisor...

Technically speaking, the £99ex-vat visit charge and the £85ex-vat hourly charge for repairs are not BT Retail's charges. They are Openreach's charge to the communication provider be it BT Retail, Tiscali, Talk Talk et all. There is no script but all BT Retail 151 advisors MUST advise customers of POTENTIAL charges should a fault be found on their own equipment or Openreach equipment has been damaged by the customer or their agent (builder, double glazing etc). Without acceptance of that potential charge the 151 advisor is not permitted to proceed with a fault entry.

Please bear in mind that the 151 advisor probably only has a sometimes unclear line test result to work on alongside the customer's word that they have completed the apparatus checks (as explained in the front of the phonebook, on bt.com/faults and on the automated helpline number 0800 028 5705). Believe it or not it has been known for some customers to stretch the truth regarding completion of these checks! CCTV has not yet developed to the extent in this country where the advisor can see a frustrated customer waving a broken external cable at them either. Additionally, most advisors do not have an engineering background so may not be able to interpret the information supplied with the test apart from the words "Line test - OK".

At the end of the day it is down to the visiting Openreach technician to decide if charges should or should not be raised. So, no one should be forced to pay £99 (or more) for a genuine "wear and tear" repair to any part of the phone line that is Openreach's responsibility to maintain.

technically that is true, though i have been on many re-visits where the EU has been charged for the previous work(and is currently disputing it), and when i've looked at the fault history we have never raised charges.
i even experianced it myself when i had my line installed, i was quoted a free install, but they still req's an engineer and that i may have had to pay £125 incase they had to do anywork. obviously i did the job myself and in the wiring report put no work done and that cabling existed. then what a pleasent surprise i got charged. took 3 phonecalls, plus with me reading the CSS job details back to them before i was refunded.