BT Phone Socket SCAM

JokerDurden

Until now I've had no problems with BT apart from trying to explain problems to their foreign call centres.

I'll start at the beginning.

At the start of April I got an Open Reach engineer to come out to boost my broadband speed as it was dreadfully slow, he managed to double the speed giving me 1mb. He installed a new socket as the one currently there dated back to when Romans were building roads at no cost and fiddled things with wires and stuff in the exchange. (Happy)

In June the BT cabling was subject to a lightening strike which knocked out the phones for three weeks. Whole road was affected by this as BT had to dig and replace the cabling. Once they replaced this I got a call from an Open Reach engineer who was outside my house and need to get in to replace the socket as that would have been damaged too as with other houses on the road. Couldn't do this at the time as I was at work so was told to phone and book an engineer to come back and replace it.

So called the number and spoke to a woman which was a very difficult call to explain that the fault wass ongoing and I needed an engineer to come out and replace the socket as instructed by open Reach. She then wanted to close the original fault as being completed and then raise a new fault for the socket. I thought this strange at the time and thought there must be a motive behind this, so instructed her not to close off the fault and to insure it was all part of the same fault, after about an hour this was agreed and said engineer turned up and replaced the socket. (phones and broadband working, Happy).

Yesterday I get a call from BT, "We have received the engineers report and the socket was corroded, we will be billing you £137.50".
My neighbour has confirmed the BT Open Reach engineer never told her that the socket was corroded as she had to let him in to fix it, blimey it was only 2 months old. Tried explaining this to BT that nothing can get to it to have something spilt on in etc and that it must have been a defective part to start with.

If this happens to anybody else please be aware of BT wanting to raise a seperate fault for the socket.

JokerDurden

Just spoke to a really helpful woman at BT in Exeter who has spoken with engineers. She has now cancelled the billing, hooray for UK call centers. (Happy)

Mark_In_Hampshire

One possible source of confusion is what the bill is for - the original replacement, or the second one. You would imagine it's the former.

In any event BT are responsible for the network up to and including the master socket. Corrosion could be caused by the customer - for instance dropping liquid into the socket - but given the age of the equipment you'd also think that corrosion occured over time.

If it was not something which you caused, then it is not chargeable, so you need to raise a dispute on that portion of your bill.

This article is a little old now, but I'm not sure if Openreach are up to the same tricks still:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/watchdog/2009/10/bt.html

Oddly enough the wiring in our house is ancient (pre 1981 sockets, no master, GPO joints) and that's one of the reasons why the broadband is useless (less than 2Mbps), so we don't use it at all - we use a 3G modem which is about 50% faster than the phone line was.