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BT:
Why are you ALWAYS difficult to contact,
argumentative, contradictory, wrong, threatening and expensive...?
The Porting of 01245-348000 The saga started around 1995 when we obtained the rather nice exchange number 01245 348000, and used this until 2003 when we moved across Chelmsford to our present location - which is also an 01245 exchange (Danbury). In those days, number porting was not possible - even moving a number within one code area was not possible, and we were forced to pay for the redirection for the past 8 years - so thus far BT has managed to charge £1000 under what we feel are false pretences. This is another one of those case where BT exploits customer inertia - because when faced with the task of sorting this out, we occasionally tried to tackle the BT system and process, but gave up after a couple of wasted hours. Everything about BT customer service is now about avoiding having to answer a phone. The experience of dealing with a BT call centre has long since been the butt of jokes, so you might think that alternatives can only be better..?
At some point in those 8 years BT was told by the industry regulator to stop messing about and enable number porting to other telcos, which presumably meant within its own network as well! Starting a few years back, we tried to find out how to port the number to a VOIP provider, and gave up. Foolishly no log of that process was taken, but you can be quite certain much time was wasted, and much frustration was incurred. A few days ago we looked at the bill and felt that by now SURELY this was possible. We paddled through the online interface and could see nothing about number porting. The BT website is a maze of massive proportions, apparently designed to shoo punters away, and stop bothering them. After 3 or 4 goes, the online chat eventually worked and we were given a number to call for further information. So we called for help on 0800 800 152 and were on hold for 32 minutes before getting through to someone who told us (very nicely, and in English) after ascertaining details of the number and account number, that the receiving VOIP provider would initiate the process. We asked one of our existing VOIP providers (that our exchange system presently uses) to perform the act, and gave them all the requested details.
What a hopeless "failure advice" that was. Typically for BT, it contains their own jargon to help keep the punters confused. LCP? So we have forwarded all this to btcare@bt.com and await the next news... part of what I sent included reference to this site, and apparently one of them read the other BT tale here and responded with a tweet. This is actually an outrageous misuse of twitter by BT. Utterly disgraceful.
If you read the ADSL saga, you will see that it was entirely BT's problem - like every ADSL we have ever encountered involving the BT network. But BT's threat of charging £150+ for any call out continues
Latest news on number port:-
Yes, all this time was wasted because BT refused to accept that CM1 1NP was the same as CM1 1NP . What a bunch of clowns. And finally....
Midday Nov 4th - tested and it WORKS!! Now let's see if BT stops billing the redirection...
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