Agreement changes and lack of service

Markdavid1962

This is the situation with my daughters BT connection, I will summarise the points below. I have raised a complaint and been offered compensation but my daughter would prefer to cancel

Contract taken out in Aug 2021 (Broadband Fibre2  (62MB Guarantee), TV entertainment package and Phone) - Equipent provided but no phone provided.
Issues at the beginning included kit which didnt work, two accounts, eventually everything worked until Jan 2022
Jan 2022 My daughter was upgraded to Digital Voice, no phone access for 8 months. BT did not provided any instructions or phone. We have just resolved the actual issue, ie phone plugged in to superhub. Tested BB last month and 38MB, another fault repaired. Managed to get 58MB download speed.

In the complaint re phone and BB speed, they have said my daughter cant cancel as when the implemented Digital Voice, the lowered the Broadband guarantee, Told check email  for updated broadband speed (you had 14 days to cancel and didnt) and instructions provided with phone re smarthub (which we didnt receive)

So here is my question do we have a case to cancel as we didnt receive a phone ?

iniltous

If you were moved onto DV and continued to have your phone plugged into the old copper pair socket rather than the router , that ( I’m afraid ) is not your providers ‘fault’ , the instructions say to plug the phone into the router, DV doesn’t need a specific type of phone , BT will supply one in request ( or an adapter to intergrate the existing sockets with DV ) but again it’s not essential for DV, the phone that was in use could have been used with DV.

Moving into DV doesn’t affect broadband speed , it may or may not cause a new minimum term , but if you were told you were being moved ( rather than requesting it yourself) I’m pretty sure it doesn’t create a new minimum term anyway.

Faults do happen , irrespective of the ISP , if it’s reported but not fixed and any quoted minimum guaranteed speed cannot be achieved then ( after a reasonable period ) you can leave penalty free, but TBH , it doesn’t seem to me that you have grounds for this, getting DV doesn’t reduce minimum speeds , however , if real life data is available, and speeds are lower ( due to crosstalk for example ) at renewal the minimum guaranteed speed can be less than it was previously , but as it would be the same line, same FTTC equipment if you moved provider the actual speed wouldn’t change anyway. 

ISP don’t issue a minimum speed them take steps to hold a connection down to that speed , that’s not how it works.

matelodave

We were moved to DV last year. The instructions were perfectly clear about plugging the phone into the router as well as being offered either a posh DV phone or phone adapter for free.As far as I can remeber, it was communicated both by letter (in the post) and by post, together with instructions on how to claim the free phone or adapter. Additional phones or adapters could be purchased as well as getting the freebie.

We chose the DV phone and plugged our existing DECT phone into the router as well giving us the benefit of being able to make two calls or receiving two calls simultaneously. It was quite handy being able to accept an incoming call whilst the phone was already in use.

It had no effect on the operation or speed of our broadband service and we were very happy with it.