Lost the sparkle! :( (btinternet.com)

Member Name: markbuk

Product:	btinternet.com
Date:	01/01/02 (752 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Unlimited access, 50MB Webspace

Disadvantages: Connection problems unacceptable, Poor customer service, Seem to want to shed customers

BT Internet

About 8 years ago, I purchased a new Compaq PC. As I eagerly open the boxes and lifted the unit out, a small green envelope marked "CompuServe" fell to the floor.
Thus began my illustrious, extensive and sometime frustrating journey on the electronic superhighway we all know as the Internet.

I remained a CompuServe member for about 2 years, frequented a lot of the forums there, and made many new on-line friends. However, as time went on and my knowledge and experience of on-line life improved, I needed something a little different.

Although not a "Net Nerd" (to coin an annoying phrase), I was finding the cost of being on-line with CompuServe and it's per minute charging prohibitive. Not only that, but I was continually finding myself leaving the safe confines of the CS community and wondering out into the greater World Wide Web.

A number of my new on-line friends were finding the same thing and, admittedly with some reluctance, we set off for pastures new. I settled with Zoo Internet, a new venture which had sprung from a cellphone company. After a long and relatively pleasureable experience with Zoo, things seemed to tail off with them. Although I still keep an e-mail account with Zoo, they were very late in introducing all inclusive packages and this was what I was now in need of.

After a careful evaluation of the market and based on the experiences of friends and colleagues alike, I chose BT Internet for my new ISP. At the time (Around Christmas 1999) they were offering a package which charged normall rates duing the week, but from 6pm Friday until Midnight Sunday, calls were free. At that time, this was one of the most generous packages available.

I duly signed up and enjoyed my free time allowances. Then, in the new year of 2000, they graciously extended their offering to include weekday evenings from 6pm until midnight. And this was without an increase from the mont
hly charge of £10. Very out of character for a BT company - although BT Internet was until recently a little more in tune with the needs of its customer base than the rest of the BT Group.

But this is the point when the story begins to sour a little - the scheme was obviously so popular that the level of service began to diminsh quite dramatically. Often the dial-up number would give an engaged tone (something I had not once experienced in the past with BT Internet), when connected download speed would almost drop to nil and frequent disconnections would happen. Although I waited for the service to creep back to normal levels, nothing appeared to be happening. I shot off a couple of e-mails to Customer service, but replys were a long time in comming and simply reassured me that things would be back to normal soon.

This carried on for about 3 months. In April 2000 I began to assess alternative ISP's just as things reverted to normal. Everything was fine so I curtailed my plans to jump ship.

The status quo remained, service-wise, until September 2001 when things started to go downhill dramatically. In the meantime, I had changed from the weekends/evening package to the similar SurfTime package, as this allowed the weekday evenings free period to carry on until 6am rather than stop at midnight. Pretty swiftly after changing my account over to SurfTime, I moved on to their new unlimted package for £14.99 per month.


After a year with the unlimited package, the same old problems began to occur - this time worse than ever. Instead of getting the engaged tone, the dial-up would connect as normal but then kick me off while logging in, citing any one of about 4 different reasons each time. It could take up to 15 attempts to connect. I sent a number of e-mails off to Customer Service, some of which did not even garner a reply.

Meanwhile BT Internet started moving certain subscribers over to a new dial-up to cater for the
increase in subscriptions. I had hoped this would rectify the dial-up problems I was suffering. However, it did nothing of the kind. I also received a letter in the mail, explaining that new infrastructure was being installed to allow for extra capacity and also acknowledgine that problems were being encountered by some members. Shortly after this, I received a reply to one of my e-mails, claiming that my problem was isolated (contraty to the admissions made in the letter) and that should I wait a little longer, my problems - which they claimed were simply due to occasional net congestion - would be cleared. At my request, a refund of one months fee was offered as compensation.

A few weeks later, I recieved a mass-market e-mail stating again, that there were problems due to the number of subscribers and that if BT Internet were to install additional equipment to cope with this new traffic, they would be forced to increase the subscriptions fees many times over - in other words - tough!!

At the beginging of December, I e-mailed again - despite the claims their customer service representative had made to me with regard to recent changes in capacity, my problems had got worse - I was still suffering with the same dial-up problems but with the added hassle of being disconnected for no apparent reason after between 10 - 30 minutes. This then meant going throuhg the whole cycle of numerous attempts to dial-up again. Not only that, but I had still not received the fee refund.

With this in mind, I somewhat reluctantly cancelled my account with BT Internet and moved on to a new service with Vizzavi, the Vodafone/Vivendi Universal operated portal. A similar package but for only £12.99 per month with a promotional offer of 3 months for the price of 2!

So far I've been with them about 4 weeks - no problems to report as yet. After another month or so I will raise an opinion on them too.

It really is a shame - at one time BT Inter
net was a cracking ISP, very much at odds with the rest of BT - but sadly those days seem to have gone.

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