Loss of phone & broadband, again.

Daveydub

I was taking my phone and broadband off Toucan who after a series of buy-outs became Talk Talk. I had a variety of problems with my service which led me to have to deal with their notoriously poor customer services department. Eventually I had enough and moved to Tesco. I have been with Tesco for approx 70 weeks now and have enjoyed a full service for about 52 of those weeks. I am currently without phone or broadband, phone went off two weeks ago and when Openreach called 3 days later to fix the problem they removed my broadband as well. As it was after 6pm on a Saturday I fully understood why the engineer needed to go home for tea and he said that this would have to wait untill Monday. I have sent 2 emails and 2 letters to Tesco without response though to be fair the second letter may have only arrived today. I have phoned them numerous times but I am usually told that it will be dealt with within 3 working days. Everyone that I speak to at Tesco agrees that I have been poorly treated then goes on to treat me just the same. I am self employed so goodness knows how I am supposed to continue with these repeated and protracted disruptions to my service. Tesco are not able to divert my incoming calls to mobile so some customers are calling at my house thinking that I must be ill or dead. If or when I ever get my phone line back again I will be considering swapping to Plusnet as if I lose service with them I can go to an internet cafe and set up diversion to my mobile. I would consider going to BT even though I am aware that the problems are all caused by them but talk of poor customer service leaves me wondering whether this would be a good move. If I lived 5 miles down a farm track I may be a bit more understanding of these faults and the delay in fixing them but I am in the middle of town surrounded by people who enjoy uninterrupted service. It is not internal wiring that is the problem, the faults have always been at or beyond the telegraph pole and on this occasion I spotted BT working at a manhole just down the road, it did not look as if it was going well so I called home and checked my broadband was on. It was not untill later that I discovered my phone was dead but I had always assumed (wrongly) that if bb worked then the phone naturally would.

Myser

Daveydub wrote: »

I am self employed so goodness knows how I am supposed to continue with these repeated and protracted disruptions to my service. Tesco are not able to divert my incoming calls to mobile so some customers are calling at my house thinking that I must be ill or dead.

It does seem that your fault has fallen between the cracks - Tesco aren't chasing BT Openreach and BT Openreach appear to have parked the problem?

As it is a standard Broadband connection, there will be no Service Level Agreement to restore your service within a certain period even though you use it for your own business. Business lines with a SLA and minimum downtime cost £000's!

I believe BT Retail do divert calls to a mobile number if your line has been down for a period of time.

Daveydub

"I believe BT Retail do divert calls to a mobile number if your line has been down for a period of time"

Is this if I were a BT customer or could I approach BT in my case?
Thanks
Dave

Myser

If you were a BT Retail customer, then yes. Not BT Openreach who manage the line from the exchange to your property on behalf of Telco. providers such as Tesco as well as BT Retail.

Daveydub

BT finally called to fix my line but I was not home so they cleared off. Fortunately a neighbour noticed and informed me so we were able to arrange for someone to be at home in case they returned. They did, fixed fault, tested and found it not fixed so if we had not been available it would have been marked as completed. They had another go and got it all working. About 3 hours later Tesco phoned to tell me that BT were aware of the problem, knew where it was, but no date had yet been set for engineer. On 31/07 Tesco informed me that they had finally replied to one of my letters yesterday, they actually should have said tomorrow rather than yesterday. Customer service is a disgrace and I am off to Plusnet. Wish me luck. At least if Plusnet tell me lies I only fall out with a telecomm provider whereas now I need to change my grocery allegiances. Looking forward to my fibre connection.