Issues when switching Landline/Broadband/TV

cmacd

My father is 92 and I discovered a few months ago that he was being ripped off by Sky and BT, paying well over £170 per month for his landline/Sky and broadband services.

He had been with Sky for 11 years straight and BT for longer. 

My biggest regret is not talking to BT and Sky on his behalf to negotiate lower charges at the outset. 

Instead, I negotiated a much better deal with Virgin, saving over £50 per month for the same services.

The Virgin engineer duly turned up but called me over to my parents to move furniture as part of the install, even though he was more than capable of doing that himself.

Then he found that the old BT landline number hadn't been ported over as requested as part of the order. Weeks of delays and issues then ensued with the landline.  My father unilaterally decided to cancel his Virgin contract as a result and tried to go back to BT.  BT forced him to take out a new contract with EE, which he duly did for everything (phone/BB/TV).

EE sub-contract Openreach to do their installations. Openreach are absolutely useless, be warned. 

EE unilaterally cancelled the first installation appointment without notice to EE or my parents. 

After complaining to EE and writing a highly critical blog on EE's website, I was elevated up to their executive complaints team.  They were able to organise an emergency appointment but the engineer assigned to do that arrived two hours earlier than scheduled, had no idea what he was meant to be doing and then refused to do anything and left! 

After further complaining to EE's exec complaints team, we were told in writing "The engineers have stated that there may have been a wrong skilled enginner assigned which has caused a mix up, feedback and review of this has been handled internally."

In the end my niece (not an engineer in any way) figured out how to perform the reconnections to the old BT and Sky equipment that was still in my parents' house and got it all working, finally with their old landline number back and functioning. 

Shortly afterwards I negotiated to go back to Sky (the contract cancellation period was still running) and they have stayed with EE for their landline and broadband.

I have just agreed to a £25 goodwill gesture from EE, nowhere near enough given all the trouble caused by Openreach.

When negotiating to go back to Sky, I was told by their sales guy that BT should have told my father to keep his contract with them running until the new services had been installed in order to make the porting of his landline much more straightforward.  Instead, the landline did not work for several weeks and when it did, was under a different number.  This in turn caused huge issues as my father was in the middle of doctors and hospital appointments etc.  Overall it was just an enormous hassle.

Lesson learned:
1) don't believe the tv ads that assure you moving your phone and old number to theirm is easy, it isn't; negotiate with your existing provider rather than switch as a first option.
2)  avoid any firm that uses Openreach at all costs. 
3) complain vociferously early in the process and insist on being elevated to the top internal complaints team.  This should help you to avoid talking to hopeless call centre staff based overseas who (in my many experiences with several firms, but mostly Virgin), are useless, hard to interpret and rarely if ever put the notes on your account that they assure you they will before ending calls).
4) Virgin is great when it works but utterly useless when issues arise, eg billing etc. 
5) Record all your calls if you can and get as much as possible in emails that you can track - avoid online contact forms.

To be fair to EE, they tried to be helpful but were hamstrung by being tied to Openreach.

littleboo

Yes, if you cancelled the landline with BT, then it makes it more difficult to port as its not an active number but sits in quarantine for a month and the porting will probably fail first time. Its not up to BT to tell you that, if anyone should, its Virgin. It should be irrelevant now anyway since there is a new switching process.
Not clear why Openreach would have needed to visit to be honest

forgotmyname

Maybe they had original OR filters fitted to the wall or an even older non plug in socket?

We had broadband fitted back in the day where the splitter/filter replaced the original faceplate by an engineer. Cannot remember why but when we switched
to FTTC an engineer had to visit and swap the box again.