BT broadband service and contract

RishiC

Hi,

I have been waiting for BT Infinity for over a year in my area and after regularly checking their website, realised that they keep moving the date back every 3 months. So this become very frustrating and after checking the current speed that im getting on my current standard BT broadband service, i was horrified to learn it was just 1.7mb!

This is when i decided to contact BT to (a) ask them if they can do anything about my poor broadband speed and (b) to see if i can get any more details on when Infinity will be available.

To cut a long story short, after emailing them and speaking to them on the phone for over a week, i basically was told that they couldn't do anything about my poor broadband speed and the speed was within their service levels and they also couldn't tell me an definitive answer of when BT Infinity was going to be available in my area as it is another BT company (OpenReach) that do cable work work, and they didn't have any more details from OpenReach other then what is already available on the BT Infinity website!

When i asked if they could give more any contact details for OpenReach, i was told that too didnt have any details and when i then asked if they can have their technical team look at my line and for an engineer to see if anything could be done to improve my current line and speed, i was told the likelihood of the engineer being able to improve anything was unlikely and that they wanted to charge me £99 for the call out!

Ive been a BT Broadband customer since 1998 and this is the service i was getting. So i got fed up, called Virgin and signed up to 30MB fibre optic broadband which is available in my area.

However, earlier this year i noticed that i was paying fat too much for broadband compared to other companies and decided to call BT to see if they could lower my monthly charges, which they did. However, i was not told that i entered any new contract, nor did i receive any new paperwork through the post - as far as i was concerned i was still on the same contract, for the same broadband, just with reduced charges.

So, when i contacted BT today to tell them that i wasn't happy with their service to me over the last week, and that i wanted to cancel, they advised that my contract doesn't end until April 2013 and that they would be charging me £170+ for the early cancellation!!!!

So i wanted to know, is this allowed? I was never advised that i was entering a new contract, nor was i sent any new paperwork!

Any advice would really be appreciated! Thanks in advance!

macman

Any change in your tariff or package invariably starts you on a new minimum term contract, why else would they agree a discount?
No paperwork is necessary, you have accepted the terms when you use the service.
Ironically, VM are notorious for the same trick.
If 1.7MBps is all your line can support, then that is all you will get on ADSL.