BT Broadband - Internet Usage Dispute

90DC

I've been receiving monthly charges of £10 for exceeding my 10GB broadband usage allowance with BT. Only my Partner and I use the broadband and only use it to visit forums, do online shopping and general browsing. There is the very odd YouTube video that we watch, but that's when we've been emailed links to them.

We were previously with o2 and used 5-6GB of broadband a month, which is why we went 10GB with BT. Difference being, we now both work in excess of 40 hours a week and definately use the internet less than what we did before.

Having emailed BT through their online form last month to query the charges, and having heard nothing back from them, I decided to phone them having received our bill, with the charges, again today. (We were slapped with a £7.50 late paying fee charge for last month as I didn't want to pay until the matter was resolved, having dealt with BT before, I know what they're like)

BT were a nightmare in setting up our phone and broadband and we went six weeks without broadband because they were incompetent.

I spoke with somebody from their version of cancellations today and he told me it'd be £170 to cancel the contract. He also said on three occasions that somebody (Either my partner or I) had been using the broadband excessively because their usage calculator is 100% accurate. We apparently use 20GB a month or thereabouts.

The broadband network is secure, nobody else has access to it, nor have they been given the passkey. He offered for an internal investigation, which I agreed to, but I have been so frustrated with BT since joining them that I said I wanted to go ahead and cancel, but I told him that in my opinion, it is ethically wrong for a company to impose cancellation charges when a customer is unhappy at the way the company treats them. (The problems with setting the broadband up, the not listening to complaints and these hugely excessive charges)

So in order to cancel the contract, I have to have an engineer come and check what's going on and obviously, they need to spot a BT fault, but what are the chances of that going to be?

We previously had o2 broadband, were using a steady 5-6GB a month

I don't want to be charged £170, but I don't want to be paying an extra £10 or £20 a month on top of the £35 a month phone and broadband contract, I also cannot be dealing with the stress I know BT bring me. What do I do?

Also, has anybody else experienced similar with BT? I welcome your thoughts and experiences.

ruggedtoast

My experience with BT is that if there is a problem you want them to fix they can be an absolute nightmare to deal with.

One of my friends actually demanded compensation from them for psychological trauma after months of them failing to activate a simple phone line in her flat, and she got it too.

Anyway, if you''re only using the one pc then you can monitor your own usage and see whats going on. You may not be using the connection much but you never know what Windows is up to.

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/tbbmeter.html


£35 a month for a phone line and 10 gig of usage seems very expensive to me by the way.

90DC

Windows doesn't search for updates unless I tell it, which is never!

£35 = Phone line, option one broadband and unlimited anytime calls to landlines.

macman

Why don't you try monitoring your own usage using the free software widely available, such as NetMeter?
What wireless encryption protocol are you using? If it's the obsolete WEP, it doesn't matter whether you hand out the key or not, as it's crackable in seconds.

90DC

Macman, I am using WEP. I have just downloaded some software

For those more clued up on BT than myself, they've told me my usage for the month is already 7GB, something which I've seen bandied around on MSE and BTCare a lot.

What is the obsession with 7GB of usage, surely not everybody uses this figure. Seems very popular with BT.

bod1467

As said, WEP is easily cracked. Change to at least WPA if your PC wifi adapter accepts this.

PS - I'm paying on average £30 per month for 18meg sync, unlimited bandwidth (no traffic shaping), Anytime calls and landline rental. (This includes the odd chargeable call (such as to mobiles) too, so this is the fully-inclusive cost). That BT plan is not competitive.

Colin_London

90DC wrote: »

Macman, I am using WEP. I have just downloaded some software

For those more clued up on BT than myself, they've told me my usage for the month is already 7GB, something which I've seen bandied around on MSE and BTCare a lot.

What is the obsession with 7GB of usage, surely not everybody uses this figure. Seems very popular with BT.

Oh dear - WEP is easily cracked nowadays. The only encryption to be recommended at present is WPA2 with AES. Oh and turn off the SSID for good measure.

You could well have had someone using your connection - some routers allow you to see a history of the MAC addresses that have, or had access to the Access Point so you might want to try and match them up with your wireless devices and see if there are any you can't identify.

victor2

You could log on to your router (as you'll have to do to change from WEP), and see if it reports any usage statistics and/or history. Look into what it offers.
Mine, for example (not a BT provided one), tells me how many days it has been running and how much data has been uploaded or downloaded through it. With such information, you can check it, do something like view a YouTube video, then check it again and see how much data went through.
10GB a month doesn't sound like much to be honest. Two smartphone users in the house, with one who streams quite a lot of TV it would seem, account for the best part of 1GB per day.

90DC

After three x 45-50 minutes-ish phone calls to customer retentions, billing and general customer services, I have had progress.

The last person I spoke to in retentions was very helpful, she even told me that over the last weekend (7th/8th) the usage was higher than in the week. I told her I'd been away for Easter in Watford and we were both confused. She told me to query this with billing, who she put me through to and they removed the previous two £10 monthly excessive charges and upgraded my broadband to Unlimited (Option Three) free of charge, so I am on unlimited calls and unlimited broadband, including line rental for £36 a month.

Result I think. I'd like to thank the female working till 8:45 this evening and the male in billing who I was probably his last call. I didn't record their names, but thank you.

ruggedtoast

You should still lockdown that connection.